The writing of this book has benefited from the ideas and experiments of many people with whom we have worked during the past twenty-five years. No one is more central than Brian Nosek, who has been collaborator, steadfast colleague, and friend. His contributions to research on “implicit social cognition” (the technical name for our specialty) began upon his arrival as a graduate student at Yale in the summer of 1996 and continue to the present. With deepest gratitude and affection, we acknowledge his extensive contributions.
Since 1988, we have been the beneficiaries of partnerships with students and collaborators whose contributions have advanced understanding of this book’s topics. Each has contributed pieces to a growing mosaic of the mind’s operation outside conscious awareness: Richard Abrams, Scott Akalis, Bethany Albertson, Daniel Ames, Judy Andrews, Justin Angle, Jens Asendorpf, Rainer Banse, Yoav Bar-Anan, Andrew Baron, Irene Blair, Timothy Brock, Frederic Brunel, Huajian Cai, Susan Carey, Dana Carney (who suggested Blindspot as the title of this book), Siri Carpenter, Eugene Caruso, Daniel Chen, Eva Chen, Dolly Chugh, Emily Cogsdill, Juan Manual Contreras, Kathleen Cook, Lois Cooper, Wil Cunningham, Dario Cvencek, Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta, Stanislas Dehaene, Thierry Devos, Christopher Dial, Claudiu Dimofte, Sean Draine, Ben Drury, Yarrow Dunham, Jeffrey Ebert, Shelly Farnham, Yuval Feldman, Christina Fong, Mark Forehand, Jerry Gillmore, Jack Glaser, Nicole Gleason, Stephanie Goodwin, Alex Green, Aiden Gregg, Elizabeth Haines, Curtis Hardin, Larisa Heiphetz, PJ Henry, Arnold Ho, Wilhelm Hofmann, Mary Lee Hummert, John Jost, Jerry Kang, Jocelyn Karlan, Kerry Kawakami, Do-Yeong Kim, Teri Kirby, Christoph Klauer, Mark Klinger, Chihiro Kobayashi, Linda Hamilton Krieger, Jennifer Kubota, Katie Lancaster, Kristin Lane, Keith Leavitt, Steven Lehr, Kristi Lemm, Dan Levin, Becca Levy, Eric Levy, Kristen Lindgren, Elizabeth Loftus, Dominika Maison, Steve McCullough, Jamaal McDell, Debbie McGhee, Paul Meinshausen, Deborah Mellott, Andrew Meltzoff, Jason Mitchell, Brandi Newell, Christelle Ngnoumen, Mark Oakes, Roisin O’Connor, Oludamini Ogunnaike, Kristina Olson, Andreas Olsson, Brian Ostafin, Marte Otten, Jaihyun Park, Lora Park, Andrew Perkins, Jacqueline Pickrell, Brad Pinter, Elizabeth Phelps, Andrew Poehlman, Doby Rahnev, Frederick Rivara, Alex Rothman, Laurie Rudman, Janice Sabin, Konrad Schnabel, Eric Schuh, Jordan Schwartz, Penelope Sheets, Alicia Shen, Kristin Shutts, Colin Smith, Kerry Spalding, Eric Spangenberg, Elizabeth Spelke, N. Sriram, Sameer Srivastava, Damian Stanley, Sabrina Sun, Jane Swanson, Christeine Terry, Brian Tietje, Eric Uhlmann, Piercarlo Valdesolo, Mark VandeKamp, Wendi Walsh, Greg Walton, Greg Willard, Caroline Wilmuth, Kaiyuan Xu, Susumu Yamaguchi, Vivian Zayas, and Talee Ziv.
As active audiences, a wide network of colleagues has helped to sharpen the ideas presented here. Our colleagues have provoked our thinking in discussions and correspondence, championed the work in various ways, or commented on our draft chapters, in some cases repeatedly. We are grateful beneficiaries of their engagement: Bob Abelson, Elliot Aronson, Visty Banaji, John Bargh, Ben Barres, Katherine Beckett, Marc Bendick, Mark Bennett, Danny Bernstein, Paul Bloom, Sam Bowles, Donal Carlston, Pam Casey, Sapna Cheryan, Nancy Cott, Robert Crowder, Jan DeHouwer, Patricia Devine, Ap Dijksterhuis, Ron Dotsch, Carol Dweck, Alice Eagly, Russell Fazio, Susan Fiske, Bill George, Daniel Gilbert, Malcolm Gladwell, Richard Gonzalez, Joshua Greene, David Hamilton, Nancy Hopkins, Earl (Buz) Hunt, Shanto Iyengar, Larry Jacoby, Marcia Johnson, Christine Jolls, Lee Jussim, Cheryl Kaiser, John Kihlstrom, Meera Komarraju, Nancy Krieger, Jon Krosnick, John Lamberth, Ellen Langer, Jan Leu, Neil Macrae, William McGuire, Wendy Mendes, Philip Merikle, Walter Mischel, David Myers, Ken Nakayama, Maura O’Neill, Lee Osterhout, Richard Petty, Steven Pinker, Scott Plous, Dan-Olof Rooth, Peter Salovey, Laurie Santos, Giuseppe Sartori, Elaine Scarry, Frederick Schauer, David Schneider, Jeff Sherman, Jim Sherman, Yuichi Shoda, Jim Sidanius, Jane Simoni, Eliot Smith, Ron Smith, Claude Steele, Fritz Strack, Michael Tarr, Robert Trivers, Jim Uleman, Virginia Valian, Shankar Vedantam, Gifford Weary, Dan Wegner, Kip Williams, Karen Wynn, Richard Yalch, Robert Zajonc, and Michael Zárate.
The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study provided both of us a year in residence when it was most needed to establish the roots of the book (and a second year in residence to MRB). The Southern Poverty Law Center provided grant support early in the life of the website and many lessons on public outreach. Sabbaticals and monetary support were extended to MRB by Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Edmond J. Safra Center for the Study of Ethics, Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and Mind, Brain, Behavior Initiative. In addition, MRB also gratefully acknowledges support from the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Indian Institute for Advanced Study in Shimla, Russell Sage Foundation, Mind Science Institute, Wallace Foundation, and especially the Santa Fe Institute, which provided a haven for writing in the final stages of the book’s completion.
Administrative and research assistants Sanden Averett, Virginia Borges, Christopher Dial, William Kaplan (the observer of “outsmarting the machine”), Jason McCoy, Tiffany Meites, Amanda Parsons, Sarah Piccioli, Elizabeth Rutherford, Roy Ruhling, and Shari Stout provided extraordinary support.
The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Le Laboratoire in Paris, the Museum of Natural History and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard, the Museum of Science and the Children’s Museum in Boston, and the Exploratorium in San Francisco featured artistic renditions, stand-alone demonstrations of the IAT, or active data gathering and immediate sharing with visitors. In these locations as well as at our own website, visitors have provided us with the rewarding experience of observing their reactions as they confronted the hidden aspects of their own minds. Their curiosity and honesty have been an impetus to us to learn more, and they have our deepest admiration.
Several individuals have gone out of their way to support the work within universities, corporations, government agencies, and nonprofits, often in unexpected ways. They have made us see more directly than we ourselves could that these ideas have application to critical decisions that shape lives in the worlds of education, law, business, government, medicine, and any sphere where human beings make decisions about themselves and one another: Ian Ayres, Rohini Anand, Max Bazerman, Jeffrey Bewkes, Iris Bohnet, Sandra Bushby, Peter Cairo, Jim Carrier, Richard Cohen (the first to characterize implicit attitudes as “hidden biases”), Mohamed El-Erian, Amy Edmonson, Drew Faust, James Finberg, Pat Fili-Krushel, Cintia Guimaraes, Lani Guinier, Hope Greenfield, Jon Hanson, John Irwin, Mitchell Kapor, Freida Klein, Jay Light, Jennifer Lerner, Jim Lobsenz, Karen Mills, Amy Munichiello, Thomas Newkirk, Nitin Noria, Julie Oyegun, Eva Paterson, Lisa Quiroz, Judith Resnik, Louis Scenti, Susan Silbermann, Judith Singer, Michael Smith, Jim Turley, Alessandro Zanello, and Nina Zipser.
The National Science Foundation supported an initial five years of research, during which time we developed the Implicit Association Test (IAT); the National Institute of Mental Health supported the next eight years of this research. Yale University and University of Washington supported the 1998 launch of the website where the IAT was first made widely available as an educational demonstration. The website soon moved exclusively to Yale University, where Phil Long invested resources of the Yale Computing Center to realize our dream of web-based education and research. Starting in 2003, this Internet enterprise migrated to Harvard University, which has generously contributed to support the educational and research sites that continue to operate at implicit.harvard.edu.
In 2005, together with Brian Nosek, we established a not-for-profit corporation, Project Implicit, which has provided scientific support that also sustains the operation of this site. Sean Draine created and developed software (Inquisit) that made it feasible to rapidly implement the IAT in hundreds of experiments. We recognize with gratitude his cheerful responses to our many requests for specialized procedures that allowed speedy improvement of experimental designs and made experiments easily transportable across laboratories for replication.
Toni Burbank at Random House first saw potential in these ideas and has special thanks from us. Our writing received in-depth advice from Roger Lewin and Beth Rashbaum, who found opportunities to help us write less academically. Will Murphy, our editor at Random House, demanded more from us than we considered necessary at the time, and we are grateful for his hand in the final shaping of the book. The publishing world witnessed changes as we went through successive drafts, making us aware of the expertise that publishers and editors commit to cultivating the interface of scientists with general audiences. Katinka Matson and John Brockman have our gratitude not only for representing us, but also for creating a forum for presenting science to the public that did not exist before they imagined it.
Over the years spent writing this book, three people provided unwavering moral and intellectual support: R. Bhaskar, Jean Greenwald, and Richard Hackman were unfailing in their support, and they will surely be glad not to have to inquire about our progress any further. They will also recognize tangible evidence of their influence in the ideas and even the words that constitute this book.
Our parents, Coomi and Rustum Banaji and Bernice and Bernard Greenwald, surely had blindspots when it came to us. Their aspirations for us, along with those of other members of our families—Papa Ayah; Bella Banaji Lodha and Nitin Lodha; Rukhshad Banaji and Nandita Shinkre Banaji; Emily Greenwald, Lauren Greenwald and Joe Welsh; Eric Greenwald and Marjorie Clifton; Charlotte (Charlie), Julia, and Ben Welsh; Ann Alexander and Richard Khanlian—have sustained and nourished us.
The power of ideas cuts across age, gender, ethnicity, religion, culture, and nationality to bring minds together in the search for something larger than the limitations these categories typically afford. To each other we can simply say that we are fully aware of our good fortune in having found a kindred spirit in the other. It is not easy to imagine an alternative intellectual existence that could have been superior.