Malcolm Gladwell and Unconscious Thinking

          William Gladwell's hard hitting piece of writing brings up a topic that most of us never really think about, unconscious thinking.  One example he talks about is William Harding.  Harding was chosen as President because of his good looks.  The thing I found most shocking about this was the fact that the main reason he was elected was his appearance.  This shows that even though we may deny it, we do occasionally judge others based on their appearance.  Although Harding was good looking, he is said to be one of the worst presidents in United States history.  We should always learn about all aspects of a possible leader before giving them our vote.  A good leader should be smart, experienced, hard working, and able to make tough decisions and stand by their decisions.  People automatically went with the more attractive option without really thinking about it.  In other words, they were biased towards better looking people.
         
          We all have biases whether we like it or not. People may try to undo these biases however they cannot be undone because they are done without thinking.  Malcolm Gladwell also mentions the IAT test.  This stands for the Implicit Association Test which tests your implicit or unconscious decisions.  This test reveals some results that may shock some people or make them feel uncomfortable.
         

          As a class, we were able to go online and take this test.  The test has many different topics on unconscious thinking, the two I took were the Gender and Race tests.  The gender test was to see if you associated men with career and women with family or men with family and women with career.  The point was too see if you thought women should take care of the kids and the house and men should work or vise-versa.  My results for this test were very little to no biases toward either group.  The race test related European Americans to "bad" words such as nasty and horrible, and African Americans to "good" words such as joy and love then the words bad and good were switched. This is where you saw if you are partial to European or African Americans.  My result for this test was a very slight preference towards European Americans.  This result was surprising to me because I didn't think I had any biases.  The truth is we all have unconscious biases however, we have never realized them.

Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink talks more about these unconscious biases.  Here is a link to a video where he talks about the book and unconscious thinking.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TRioBKpUwY