Are We All Racists?

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Novelists offer deep insights into human psychology that often take psychologists years to test. In his 1864 “Notes from Underground” for example, the Russian novelist, Theodore Dostoyevsky, observed: “Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself — and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself — and every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind.”

Intuitively, the observation rings true. But is it true experimentally?

Twenty years ago, social psychologists Anthony Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and Brian Nosek developed an instrument called the Implicit Association Test — the IAT — that they claimed can read your innermost thoughts that you are afraid to tell even yourself. And, those thoughts appear to be dark and prejudiced…

[Video and text source: Skeptic YouTube channel]