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COGNITION AND BIAS
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking is, in its author's words, about "rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye." Depending on context and the viewer's expertise, consequent decisions or reactions may be faulty, even disastrous, or amazingly accurate. How can this be? The answer is complex.
The book can be read as a partial explanation of the mechanics of unconscious bias. It ends with some fascinating stories about hiring in orchestras that will have a familiar ring for those familiar with academic inequities. Abbie Conant, a trombonist, auditioned behind a screen and was chosen with great enthusiasm by expert musicians - until she was seen. After she was hired, her troubles began. She was demoted to second trombone (no reason given). She sued, and after eight years, was reinstated as first trombone. Receiving equitable pay took another five years. (Details are on Conant's Web site.) A second story again shows the power of the screen. The Metropolitan Opera had no women in its brass section and "everybody knew" that women could not play the horn as well as men. Julie Landsman, a French horn player, auditioned behind a screen. Like Conant, she won the audition. And, like Conant, she was a surprise. She had already played for the met as a substitute.
The book begins with a well-publicized story about accuracy - how the Getty Museum found out that a statue was a fake. Although a geologist had made extensive tests of its marble and declared that the statue must be hundreds or thousands of years old, art experts who looked at the statue instantly said there was something wrong. Eventually, the supporting evidence unraveled. The art experts were right.
What's the difference between these two kinds of stories? Why couldn't musicians make the same kinds of quick, accurate judgments that the art experts could?
If you're familiar with academic cases, the answer is immediate: Gender bias, perhaps mixed with biases about race, ethnicity, or age. But how does it work? The book describes some ways that unconscious perceptions can influence us. Experimenters who induced these unconscious perceptions asked their subjects to explain their actions and got explanations which one characterized as "just random, noise."
WAGE
Newsletters have documented the sometimes imprecise, rather unacademic quality of explanations given for tenure denial.There is, of course, the vague and ever-popular "uncollegial" (Spring 2002 Newsletter). Explanations may vacillate. One college president explained a tenure denial as due to the candidate's inadequate teaching, and contradicted himself a year later, when he said it was due to the same candidate's scholarship alone (Spring 2000 Newsletter). Explanations about not hiring women in orchestras can have a similar imprecise quality. In Abbie Conant's trial, the orchestra argued that, among other things, "The plaintiff does not possess the necessary physical strength to be a leader of the trombone section." Conant passed a physician's exam with flying colors. The court ruled, "The accused has not justified their demotion with facts, but rather generalized value judgments."
Unlike academic hiring, there is a simple remedy to eliminate bias in selecting orchestra musicians. Blink concludes, "over the past few decades, the classical music world has undergone a revolution.... since screens have become commonplace [in auditions], the number of women in the top us orchestras has increased fivefold." As recent reports show, we're far from such a revolution in academe.
-wage@wage.org-