tavis: good evening. from los angeles, i am tavis smiley. tonight, a conversation with dr. anthony greenwald, whose new book, "blindspot," shakes up the assumption that prejudice is something other people have to grapple with. i am glad you could join us for a conversation about ingrained attitudes and unintentional bias is with author anthony greenwald, coming up right now. >> there is a saying that dr. king had that said there is always the right time to do the right thing. i just try to live my life every day by doing the right thing. we know that we are only halfway to completely eliminate hunger, and we have a lot of work to do. walmart committed $2 billion to fighting hunger in the u.s. as we work together, we can stamp hunger out.

>> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. tavis: most of us like to think of ourselves as fair and willing to take people as they are, but a new book titled "blindspot" challenges that notion. authored by research scientist dr. anthony greenwald, about how we have errors in how we proceed people and make decisions. i am honored to have you on the program. >> thanks.

please call me tony. >> -- tavis: i will call you tony. i will sit back, and this black board will be yours. i am going to sit back and listen to how this process works, so take it away, tony. >> ok, i first saw this test when i created it 15 years ago. starts where you see the labels in the corners, european- american, african-american, sometimes a black, white, we use either, and then you see this in the center. this is the picture of an african-american face, in you are supposed to give the right response, and on the keyboard, it would be the i key, so i hit the i key, and this would be the

white face, and i would respond with the e key, and i would practice, learned to associate the right key for the black faces and the white faces, the i key for the black faces and the e key for the white faces. now we will see a series of words. there will be a few of them. laughter is a pleasant word, so i would press the e key, and then we would get another word, and this is an unpleasant word, and i would press the i key, right response, and i get practice with us this getting the left response and the right response, a very easy task, and then we move into will be called a combined task with a different screen. now, we are just combining the two tasks. so now the white faces and the good word to get a lift

response, and the black faces and the unpleasant words get the right response. the first time i did this, i was actually quite surprised how easy it was for me to do this, and so this would get a right response, and then there would be a series of other faces. i think we will see a white one, but also words, pleasant and unpleasant words, so i am getting a mixture of words. if you try this in the book or on the website, you will see a series. this is for about 75% of americans a fairly easy task, and it was for me the first time i did it, and then along comes another. now we are going to switch. i was responding right on the left before and black on the right. now the said change. black is on the left, and white is on the right, now, this would get the i key response as opposed to the e, and now there

is an blackface coming up, and i would just practice this task, and a new combined task, so there would be a bunch of these, and then along comes this, and the first time i saw this one, i was amazingly poor at performing this task. i had to give the same response to black faces and pleasant words with my left hand and white faces and unpleasant words with my right and, and whereas i was passed in the previous one, with the combined task, i was slow on this one. i could understand what. we may have one more, this may be the last one. this would get it. but the problem was, i later discovered, is that this is difficult for me because i must have in my head associations more of white with pleasant than black with pleasant, and that is how it turned out, how this

became a measure of a strength of those associations. >> -- tavis: so how does it feel as a researcher, as a scientist to have to challenge, to come face-to-face with your own bias es. >> it was remarkable. on the one hand, i was discovering something in my head that i did not like, that i did not want their, and at the same time, i thought this produces an effect on behavior that can be measured, and it is not a small effect. it is a big effect. the combination of a little distressed, maybe more than a little distress of what i was discovering was in my head, and sort of scientific joy of finding something that i knew it could potentially be important. tavis: doctor, you stressed earlier the importance of these slides, that 75% of the people what? >> americans, about 75% showed a

pattern that i have discovered in myself when i first took this, which is that it was easier to give that response to white faces and pleasant words than two black faces and pleasant words, and that is shown by about 75% of whites and asian-americans, somewhat of a smaller percentage of hispanic americans, but black americans are quite different. you might think they would be just reverse. they show very consistently, maybe 75%, that it is easier for them to give the response to black faces with pleasant words. it is easier, but it is only about 35% to 40% net find that easily. another of a similar amount finds the same that i found to be easy, and they behave like the majority of white people, and then there is 20% or 30% in the middle that have no preference. tavis: a very scientific answer, but i want to ask a very unscientific question but a more explicit answer.

what does what you just said say about the humanity of black people? >> that is a good question. i do not -- i am not sure i am an expert -- tavis: but the fact that black people found it almost as easy, a good percentage of them found it almost as easy as you did to find giving those types of responses in reverse, does that say something about the way they view the world, the lands they look through, the way they view the world proved but regent the world? >> why do they not have the same preference -- the way they view the world? >> there were these two things. egalitarian. actually, their reactions are that they are mostly happier to get the result that is the opposite of mine, when they show that they can sort of

affirmative brought -- the value of their blackness by giving the response to the black faces. tavis: i am digging a little deeper here, because it is not just reaffirming their love for their own kind. what i am particularly interested in, curious about, is how it is they are in sync with you when it comes to viewing the white faces, and why it is they are not as harsh on white faces as you are on black faces. ice humanity. use a egalitarian. but there is another option. they are just better on keyboards than white people, which is unlikely. >> we are talking about a piano, and many of them are. tavis: there are an awful lot of white pianists. >> and i like all of them. but i think this reflects many americans, many black americans, growing up in a society that is

predominantly white american, and they have incorporated some of that witness -- whiteness in themselves. we need to do more research and find where it starts with children. we are just learning to do this result with children. we are trying it with five-year- olds calf, -- five-year-olds, and we are trying to see where it starts. tavis: i am not a scientist, but i have been black for 48 years, and i get it from the perspective of just being an african-american in the country, though i am not a scientist, and i celebrate the humanity of black people at their best. we have taught this country how to love it itself in spite of. it is often in spite of and not because of. black people in this country understand the white experience much better than white folk

understand african-american experience. i think a lot of that comes with these tests, but i digress. my point is is that my friend professor west has made the point that it is amazing to him that black people in the course of this country did not start a sort of black al qaeda to get back and white folk for what was done to us, much like south africa when nelson mandela came to foul -- power. all of the black folks did not rise up. i think this does say something about the humanity of black people, but i digress on that point. what is fascinating beyond that, why do we call these by itse -- paul this biases as opposed to racism? -- why do we call it that? >> hidden biases of good people. our first assumption is that we were measuring something that had to do with hostility of

whites toward blacks, but so many of the people who took this test were telling us, i do not feel hostility. i do not really understand why i am showing this result, but i think i believe fully in equality. and i believe that the great majority of those people are telling me this accurately, so the question is, what is happening there? there is something in their head they are not fully aware of. an automatic preference for white. we thing that they are feeling a bit uncomfortable in the presence of black people. we think what this tells us is that for white people, the environment in which the are comfortable is one in which has other white people in it, and because they do not have a great experience interacting with

african-americans, they feel some discomfort. artest is measuring something that predicts that discomfort, and that discomfort is important. i think it is important for both black people and what people to understand because interactions between white and black arise, and white people can feel uncomfortable in an interaction, and they probably just want to avoid it and get out of it. black people will see what people behaving that way. they will assume the white person does not like them. they may in turn dislike a white person for exactly that reason, blame the white person. it is probably happening that each is tending to blame the other for a poorly managed interaction. it actually has to do with these hidden biases in the head of the white person. the black person is less of a contributor in that. tavis: there are 14 or so other

tests. gender tests. there are other tests that one can take on the internet do to your fine research and work, but i went online myself a few days ago and played around with this so i could be prepared for this conversation, and there is a political test that you have on here. it features a test of barack obama. you know the test. >> the presidential preference tests. tavis: the presidential preference tests. it made me think about this just a second ago, and i am sure there is no connection between the two, but i want to talk about it in case pier is. a moment ago, you walked through here, you have random faces of black people. if you to barack obama's faced in the test we see, i suspect the response of white people may be different, or does a better." which leads me to the question of whether or not some of this has to do with the right kind of

black people that white folks respond to as opposed to just random black folks. does that make sense? >> yes, we can construct a random test, and this has been done, where we compare, we make the blackface is famous, admiral blackface is, and we make the white faces some of the better known mass murderers, and this produces a different result, not surprisingly, so it does make a difference. it is for that reason we do not use famous people's faces in this, but if you match the faces, using famous white and famous black, you will get the same. there is one on the web with cute little black and white children. tavis: even with babies. >> yes, and five-year-olds. it was very disturbing.

this is not to say that people treat kids the way they treat adults or treat stars the way they treat unknown, but the test actually sort of filters all of that out. it is just race, and race makes a huge difference in our society. tavis: how to be juxtaposed the reality of your research results with the human jenna project, which basically tells us we ain't different. how do we juxtapose those? >> it is almost entirely learned and acquired. i mean, yes, our genes are very similar, but there is a gene for skins features, an african american and european, that may be just a tiny portion of genes, but we have culturally grown it to treat those as things by

which we categorize people. tavis: do you think that they can be unlearned or unacquired? >> it would be nice if it were that easy. we have been doing research. others have been doing research, trying to eradicate the associations, the implicit, the hidden biases, but it does not happen easily. imagine you were -- here is an example. all of a sudden, we decide, well, women we call she, her, men we call he and him, and let's change that. we will call the women he and heim and men she and her. we could not do that. actually, in the 1970's, we did that when we try to get rid of

male pronouns generically. 40 years later, some of us are having difficulty with that, and that is the kind of difficulty. these are things so ingrained, so automatically established that erratic eating them is no simple task, perhaps impossible. we are only going to be passed this when our culture has changed enough so that they are not acquired the way they are required now. tavis: we could have done the same thing we did tonight for race, we could have done the gender tests, but we did not, because i wanted to give people a eighth opportunity of how it works. you can take the test. but now folks understand how the system is set up and how the test works, tell me what you have learned from these tests? >> the interesting thing, the gender results are also a bit disturbing. we found that there is a very strong will recall stereotypes

association that associates men with career and work, women with family and home, and it is a strong association measured by the test then people will say if they just answer survey questions, and when answering survey questions, women will make it clear that they do not agree that female is associated more with family and home and not with work and career, but that actually shows a strong results. the women have built into their heads the same associations that men have about associating male with work and career, women with come and family, only stronger, and this is important. it is important to recognize it because it becomes a force in the workplace, not only a force in the way people judge women in the work force but also how women judge themselves. women in the workplace are at risk of feeling like fish out of water. women belong in the home.

that is what these associations -- tavis: you say that women have internalized some of these. >> they cannot help it. they have been brought up from a very young age, and there may be a genetic component of this, but the learned component of this is just huge. so when women get into the workplace and are competing with men, there are at a bit of a disadvantage because they are handicapped of feeling less a home in the workplace. it is not that they have believes that tell them it is the wrong place for them to be, it is that they have got these associations in their head that just tell them women, family, babies. tavis: the answer to this question i am about to ask may be found in what we talked about already. race and gender, maybe not. you tell me. out of these 14 tests that you can take on line that you have helped create for us, is there one where the results have just

completely surprised you and kind of blow you away? i cannot imagine you are blown away by the race results. it impacts. i cannot imagine it was that surprising. it would have been to me. i am -- i cannot imagine it would of been not surprising. just like black folk have internalized white supremacy. just like black folk have done that, women have internalized patriarchy. i am not surprised by that. is there another test that completely blew you away? >> within a few years, i stopped being blown away by an unexpected results, but one result did surprise me. we found a strong results which recall an automatic preference for young, which is that people get a much easier time given the same response to a young looking faces and pleasant words than old looking faces and pleasant words, and this happens for

young and old people in our society. i went to china to talk about this test, and i but i am visiting society where might it stereotypes as they a preference for elders. i am going to give this same test to a group of chinese, and it is going to come out differently from the united states. know. it came out exactly the same as in the united states. they have as strong an automatic preference for young. tavis: i have been to china and number of times. looking for an answer as to why i think that would be the case with this particular generation, given their culture? >> i think the reverence for elders is a learned thing in the culture that is very traditional, and it gets, let's say, a lot of lip service, and people believe it. they do have a preference for elders. what they do not understand, or

what i think is that they are exposed to many of the same thing that basically communicate that youth is the time. youth is associated with more things than old age is. this will happen in any culture. it is the old people that are getting sicker and infirmer. tavis: they are scared of the west, they are scared of being westernized with all of our mores. obviously, you are still doing great research. in the end, what is your hope for this research? what do you want the tick away to be? bis does not necessarily reaffirm about ourselves as good people? >> i want good people, including myself, to understand that there

are things inside their head that they do not know are there and that are causing them possibly to be less good than they think they are and then they want to be, and they are going to have to live with this for many years, probably, because until we learn how to change it, which we do not really know how to do now, i think this lesson that we need to, as we call in the book, outsmart the machine that is our ahead with these associations, i think if people can take that away from this work, it will put them on the trap of trying to do things that will allow their behavior their goodness more than they can. tavis: this might sound of at the end of the conversation when you are talking to a scientist, but when you say we do not know how quite to fix this. i think you are right on a certain level, but love wins.

dr. anthony greenwald is the co- author of "blindspot," and i am delighted to have you on. thank you for your research and for your time. i was more than interested. compelled, i would say. that is our show for tonight. as always, keep the faith. >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. tavis: hi, i'm tavis smiley. join me next time for a conversation with comedian, writer, producer, director david steinberg about the very serious side of being funny. that is next time. we will see you then. >> there is a saying that dr. king had that said there is always the right time to do the right thing. i just try to live my life every day by doing the right thing. we know that we are only halfway to completely eliminate hunger, and we have a lot of work to do.

walmart committed $2 billion to fighting hunger in the u.s. as we work together, we can stamp hunger out. >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. thank you.