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Profile of Mahzarin R. Banaji PROFILE PROFILE Profile of Mahzarin R. Banaji Jennifer Viegas, Science Writer Harvard University experimental social psychologist Mahzarin Banaji is on the frontlines of the “implicit revolution,” a paradigm shift in psychology that, since the 1980s, has been reconceiving the relationship be- tween unconscious and conscious mental processes. Banaji and her colleague Anthony Greenwald applied the concept to social psychology via the intertwined concepts of attitude, belief, and identity. In 1995, the duo defined implicit social cognition, introduced the term “implicit bias,” and foreshadowed the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to detect and measure auto- matic, unintentional biases. The IAT and other methods have enabled Banaji and her colleagues to uncover hidden biases in the form of attitudes and beliefs (ste- reotypes) of gender, race/ethnicity, age, sexuality, and other common social group identifiers. Elected in 2018 to the National Academy of Sciences, Banaji re- ports evidence in her Inaugural Article (IA) suggesting that implicit beliefs and attitudes are inextricably linked due to shared evaluative content. Teaching at the Age of Five Years Banaji was raised Zoroastrian in the Hindu and Muslim cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad, India. “My family and I remained largely within the borders of a small and homogenous Parsi community, while vora- Photograph of Mahzarin Banaji. Image courtesy of ciously learning about the world through the printed Robert Taylor (photographer). page,” she says. Her father Rustom shared his love of the arts with his children, but the scientist in Banaji was Introduction to Experimental Social Psychology equally captivated by the inner workings of toys and After graduating from St. Ann’s in 1971, at the urging mechanical objects. She says, “It seemed obvious that of her mother, Banaji entered Nizam College in whatever was inside and hidden from view was infi- Hyderabad, a college she selected partly for its prox- nitely more fascinating than whatever was outside imity to a cricket stadium. She earned a bachelor of arts and accessible.” degree with a combined major in philosophy, English Her mother Coomi was a teacher who, with Banaji’s literature, and psychology in 1976. She received a aunt, opened a small school in their home. To keep National Merit Scholar Award, which supported her her precocious daughter from getting bored, Coomi ’ recruited five-year-old Banaji to mentor younger stu- master s degree program in general psychology from dents. This continued until Banaji entered St. Ann’s, a Osmania University. Banaji next attended Jawaharlal local parochial school. Years later, after Banaji won the Nehru University in New Delhi, intending to earn a 1991 Lex Hixon ‘63 Prize for Teaching Excellence at master’s degree in the study of larger social systems Yale College, she recalled: “Think about it; I’ve been and with an approach comparable to that of econo- practicing since I was five!” mists and sociologists. Published under the PNAS license. This is a Profile of a member of the National Academy of Sciences to accompany the member’s Inaugural Article on page 5862 in issue 13 of volume 116. Published online May 28, 2019. 12590–12592 | PNAS | June 25, 2019 | vol. 116 | no. 26 www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1908069116 Downloaded by guest on September 26, 2021 In 1980, while returning home for the holidays on refer to any unconsciously held set of associations the train from New Delhi to Hyderabad, Banaji bought about a social group. It also called for the creation of a a set of books: five volumes of The Handbook of Social test to empirically measure implicit attitudes. Psychology (1). They changed her life’s course. She says, “By the time I reached home 24 hours later, I had Empirical Assessment of Implicit Attitudes polished off a volume and knew with blunt clarity that The IAT (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/), based this form of experimental psychology was what I had on Banaji and Greenwald’s collaboration that, at Yale, to do.” She applied to schools in the United States included the contributions of graduate student Brian and won an American Association of University Nosek, was launched for the public in 1998; a year Women Fellowship (1980–1981) that helped pay for earlier, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim studies at Ohio State University, where she earned a Memorial Foundation Fellowship. The IAT is a reaction- master’s degree in psychology and a PhD in psy- time measure in which test takers may rapidly sort chology with a social psychology specialization. words or pictures into categories. Scores are computed by comparing speed and error rates, with the pairing of Mentors Influence Research Approaches concepts either being consistent or inconsistent with At Ohio State University, Banaji was introduced to stereotypes. The IAT, taken by more than 20 million psychologist Thomas Ostrom and Greenwald, who people worldwide, has revealed implicit biases in the were linking the studies of cognition and social be- vast majority of individuals, including Banaji. She says, havior. She says, “Rooted in this newly emerging ap- “Discovering my own (race) bias was a transformative proach, my dissertation research tackled the problem moment for me. I had assumed that my egalitarianism of memory for emotional events, attempting to make would hold up in all parts of my mind.” sense of a classic and controversial question concerning In a chapter for the volume The Nature of Re- the importance of the valence of information—its pos- membering: Essays in Honor of Robert G. Crowder, itivity and negativity—or its intensity.” Banaji notes that other tools, such as functional mag- While at the university, she married New York- netic resonance imaging (fMRI), can detect implicit at- based engineer and computer scientist R. Bhaskar, titudes (5). Banaji added that in a collaboration with who later switched to a legal career. She was also Harvard colleague Elizabeth Phelps, she used fMRI to named an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of explore the neural substrates of white American sub- Washington’s Department of Psychology in 1985. She jects as they observed the faces of unfamiliar black and says, “A feminist husband who was willing to travel to white males (6). The subjects’ responses that were ob- support my career and a postdoctoral traineeship served in the strength of their fear-potentiated startle— made this critical phase in my development possible.” a reflexive physiological reaction to a presented Cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, known for her stimulus—correlated with their IAT results. The brain pioneering work on the malleability of memory, activity took place in the amygdala, a subcortical opened her laboratory to Banaji. Another mentor, structure that plays a role in emotional learning Claude Steele, who was studying self-affirmation at and evaluation. the time, motivated Banaji. Origin and Patterns of Implicit Attitudes Development of Implicit Bias Theory In 2002, Banaji accepted her current position as the In 1986, Banaji accepted an assistant professorship at Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Yale University’s Department of Psychology, where Harvard University’s Department of Social Psychology. she was later promoted to associate and full professor She also served as the first Carol K. Pforzheimer Pro- positions. Her diverse research interests came into fessor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. In focus when she and her colleagues devised experi- 2006, Banaji and her student Andrew Baron published ments that allowed them to reveal implicit gender a child-oriented version of the IAT and administered it stereotyping in test subjects (2, 3). The experiments to white Americans aged six and 10 years (7). The drew from methods, such as semantic priming, that researchers found that implicit prowhite/antiblack bias were initially developed to study the unconscious was not only evident in the youngest group but also operation of memory. At Yale, Banaji performed was observed at the same magnitude as in adults. studies with students Alex Rothman and Curtis Hardin More recently, Banaji and her student Jack Cao that first used the term “implicit stereotyping” to determined that people make statistically informed describe reliance on gender without knowledge of Bayesian stereotypic judgments themselves while doing so. hypocritically criticizing others for the same behavior In a landmark 1995 article for Psychological Re- (8). The study, with implications for domains such as view, Banaji and Greenwald reviewed research find- law, business, education, and healthcare, revealed a ings concerning implicit social cognition (4). The discrepancy between how individuals perceive their identifying feature, they determined, is that past ex- own versus others’ social judgments. perience influences judgment in a manner not intro- Banaji’s work shows that explicit as well as implicit spectively known by the individual. They concluded attitudes can change over the long term, as she and that not only stereotypes, but also attitudes and self- Harvard doctoral student Tessa Charlesworth discov- esteem, have implicit modes of operation. The article ered after analyzing data from more than 4 million IAT introduced the now-common term “implicit bias” to tests completed between 2004 and 2016 (9). Crucially, Viegas PNAS | June 25, 2019 | vol. 116 | no. 26 | 12591 Downloaded by guest on September 26, 2021 the data showed that participants’ automatic attitudes videos
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