The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Neurology of Bias, and a Visit with Thundercat

Episode Date: April 9, 2019

Most of us have biases and prejudices we don’t acknowledge—or aren’t even aware of. Admitting those biases is a baseline of political “wokeness.” But measuring and proving bias, and showing how it works, is another matter. Jennifer Eberhardt is a social psychologist at Stanford University who studies these issues through neuroimaging and other experiments. Bias, in her view, is not merely a learned phenomenon but one that involves neurological patterns that are “tuned” by cultural experience. And it may operate most prominently in situations where people have the least time for reflection. Eberhardt says that intervening on a policy level to reduce the consequences of bias involves slowing down decision-making in critical situations such as policing. She spoke with David Remnick about her new book, “Biased.” Plus, Briana Younger, a music editor at The New Yorker, visits with the bassist and producer who helped make Kendrick Lamar’s album “To Pimp a Butterfly.” He goes by Thundercat. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In recent years, it's fair to say that we've become more and more aware of bias and prejudice, especially among white people. And by that, I'm not talking exactly about white supremacy and the people who marched in Charlottesville. I mean a recognition that in a society where racism absolutely does a good. exist. We are all shaped by it, you, me, everybody, to various degrees. And we're aware that subtle biases shape how we perceive people and how we behave toward them, even if we never quite express our thoughts out loud. Now, the fact that we have unconscious biases is hardly a secret, but measuring bias, proving it, and showing how it works in the brain is quite another matter.

Jennifer Everhart is a social psychologist at Stanford University who studies, these issues, the science of them and the sociology of them and the psychology of them. She's published a book called Biased. Dr. Eberhardt, your new book starts out with a discussion of how our brains are in some way wired for bias. We wouldn't have assumed this. I would have assumed that's just socially acquired. Can you explain the face recognition study that you worked on so hard and what conclusions that led you to in terms of bias? Well, we've done a number of face recognition study. So one study we did was a neural imaging

study. And there we were interested in whether there was a neural component to what researchers call the other race effect, that we recognize faces of other races less well than our own. In other words, the serious

manifestation of so-and-so looks all alike. Exactly. That terrible manifestation. Right. So there had been at least 30, 40 years of research looking at this, and we were interested in whether that had a neural component to it. And so we did an imaging study where we put people into an imaging scanner, and we had white study participants and black study participants, and we showed them all white and black faces in the scanner. And we

were interested in how their brains would respond to those faces, and especially what's called the fusiform face area. And so this is an area of the brain that is implicated in face processing and especially in distinguishing the identity, you know, among faces. Well, what we found was that this fusiform face area was much more active to faces of the participants' own race than to faces of other races. And we found that that was related to or correlated with their memory for the face later on outside the scanner. So prior to your study, what did we think? think was the case, that it was all a matter of sociology and acquired psychology?

Yes, it's interesting because as a social psychologist, you know, you study things and if you, you know, you find a result and people understand what the result is, and it seems like, oh, that's just common sense. We should have known that all along. But if you find the opposite result, they say the same thing. Oh, that's common sense. So if I'm Chinese, Han Chinese, and I grow up in a city that's all Han Chinese. Right. And then suddenly

I'm transported magically to Nairobi among lots of Kenyans. Am I different if I grew up in a community that was much more mixed? Do I have a better sense of faces and differentiation in the latter case?

Yes, you do. And so you have a basic other race effect, but if you're in a more diverse space, you're better at recognizing faces of other races than people who had never seen those faces before. So it's a sort of training of your brain, right? So our brains are responding to what we're exposed to out in our social environment, and it tunes itself on those faces. And in the U.S. in particular, you know, because we are in segregated spaces,

we see this other race effect in lots of different communities. So in a sense what you're saying is, that the root of the problem is not only neurological, but it's segregation. Yes, yes, that's what I'm saying. It's interesting because, you know, we have, you know, sort of policies in our country that help to produce that racial segregation. And so housing policy or educational policy. Exactly, exactly.

And those policies actually shape us how our brain is functioning. So it's a deep effect. Did you think it all that by beginning with the neurological aspect of this, in your book that in some way it doesn't let people off the hook, but it allows people to think, ah, it's not necessarily because I'm bad, innately bad, but that the brain works in funny ways and coupled with the sociology of how you grew up. Right. That's an explanation.

Well, I don't know. I mean, I think it is, it's true that we can have what we call implicit bias. and not be a bad person. What is implicit bias? So implicit bias can be defined as the beliefs and the feelings that we have about social groups that can influence our decision making and our behavior, even when we're not aware of it. Is it usually invisible to us? Oftentimes it is, yes, yes.

I think most people don't want to think of themselves as racist in any way. Right. And in fact, if you ask them, that's the last thing I am. I'm not racist. I'm not misogynist. I'm not this. I'm not that for all kinds of reasons that we can interpret, I hope, in some degree, as progress. Yeah. And yet what you're saying is that a lot of those people, if not all of them, are given to implicit bias. Right. A lot of companies have implicit bias training. What does that do? So that's a little hard to answer because there are so many different types of training, and they differ in terms of the content and format.

Well, I believe in the idea to an extent. I mean, I think that some types of trainings are better than others. So training that not only focuses on what implicit bias is, but also how we manage bias and giving people tools for managing bias, I think that that's more worthwhile. What kind of tools can you be given to sort of overcome? what seems to be a pretty dangerous confluence of neurology and experience. Right. I mean, it is dangerous, but we don't need to feel like we're held hostage by it. We're not acting on that bias in all situations. And so, for example, we're more likely to act on bias in situations where we have to think really quickly. We have to make decisions fast.

Like in policing? Yes, yes. And a lot of your book has taken up with phenomena having to do a criminal. criminal justice and policing specifically. Can you explain your attentional bias study that you did with police officers? What does that mean? So, yeah, so there was a study we did. We were interested in the issue of racial profiling early on. So we asked the question when officers are thinking about violent crime, are they attending more to black faces than to white faces? So it was a basic study. And so we went to a police precinct and we had officers participate in a study where we exposed them to words that they would associate with violent crime like arrest and capture and shoot.

And we used a technique called subliminal priming. We displayed those words on the computer screen at such a rapid rate that they couldn't consciously read them. And then we displayed two faces on a computer screen, a black face and a white face simultaneously. and we simply looked at which face they attended to. We looked at where their eyes went. And we found that if they... So they don't have any choice in the matter. They can't fake a kind of disinterestedness.

Right. Because they don't even know what the study is about. So when they were exposed to these words associated with violent crime, they looked more at the black face. They looked away from the white face and towards the black face. This is interesting. Okay. We discover our biases in ourselves.

if we're lucky enough to have read your book or come into contact with this kind of training or become aware in some way of what constitutes implicit bias, then what? What leads to change that's meaningful both in the individual and in institutions and in communities? Yeah, that's a great question. I think we want to not only look at individuals right, but we want to look at institutions and what they can do. So the slowing down, for example, I mean, you can try that as an individual to kind of step back and slow down and sort of think things through. But you can also be encouraged to do that through your policies and practices by an institution. So one way this took shape in Oakland was a change in their foot pursuit policy. What is that? So the foot pursuits is the term when you're chasing someone, basically on foot.

they used to chase people, you know, down dark alleys or into backyards and following them into this enclosed space. So they changed the policy so that, you know, if you lost sight of someone or the person went into enclosed space and you couldn't see where they were, you were by policy told to step back, not go in, you know, not pursue, but to set up a perimeter call for backup. So the policy basically slowed people down and allowed them to think it through and use the resources that they could. And they found a huge difference. They used to have eight to nine officer involved shootings every year. And with that change in foot pursuit policy, now they have had only eight officer involved shootings in the last five years. How does this translate to politics? We had for eight years an African-American president.

What's the effect when a president of the United States sees a white nationalist march and all its intended violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and says there's some fine people on both sides? Leadership matters. The more power you have as a leader, the more your words matter, and they can set the tone for the nation. You know, there's even research on this showing that even when you're, like someone is espousing, you know, values that are inconsistent with your own and that they're

racist or whatever, having someone in a position of power who's able to, you know, to direct the social norms in your space can get people to, you know, even who don't agree to shift in that direction. That's the danger of it, is that we are affected by our social environment so much that even when our social environment is sort of pushing us to, you know, act in a way that it's against our own underlying values, we begin to move in that direction. The book is fascinating and important, and it's called Biased, uncovering the hidden prejudice that shapes what we see, think, and do.

Jennifer Everhart, thank you very much. Thank you. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. In a minute, we'll change our tune and visit with one of the most interesting musicians at the intersection of rap and pop and jazz. And he goes by the name Thundercat. That's just a hand. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.

I'm David Remnick. Brianna Younger writes and edits the music listings in The New Yorker, and she covers, well, whoever's playing in the city, whoever's worth listening to and knowing about. So she is just marginally hipper than I am, a tiny bit, almost unnoticeable, really. Brianna, how you doing?

I'm doing well. How are you? I'm okay. So you recently visited with a musician, name Thundercat. Tell me a little bit about him. Well, Thundercat is a bassist from California. He comes from a family of musicians. He initially rose to prominence in the punk band Suicidal tendencies. And in the time since, he's kind of made the rounds working with people like Erica Badu, Childish Gambino, and probably most famously, Kendrick Lamar. So Thundercat, as I understand it, played on to Pimp a Butterfly, which is the biggest of

Kendrick Lamar's recordings, right? that album was really a sort of game changer, not just for hip-hop, but for music as a whole. And jazz especially kind of really reaped the benefits from that and kind of had a resurgence with people who maybe weren't previously following jazz like that. And Thundercat was a huge, huge part of that album. One of the sonic architects, maybe that might be overstating it. But what does that mean? What was the contribution specifically? Well, Thundercat helped produce as well as played bass on the album.

So it's a very jazz-inspired. hip-hop album and it's phenomenal. Darkest a midnight hour. Her bright is the morning sun. Give a fuck a bunch of your complexion. I know what the German's done. Sneak. Sneaking through the back window.

I'm a good field. I made a flower for you. I'm kind just to chill with you. You know I go to distance. You know I'm ten toes down. Even if Massa listening. Cover your ears. He's about dimension.

Complexion. So he was close to the rapper Mac Miller who died last year. Yes, they were very close. They worked extensively with each other as much as they worked with other people. They were planning to go on tour together before Mack passed away. So I just kind of wanted to check in with him about grief and how it kind of plays out publicly in the social media era. Where did you meet up with Thundercat?

We met at the infamous Blue Note. A club downtown in New York. I guess we'll start with where we are now, like with you in the midst of this residency. Like, how has that been going so far? Like, this is your first residency of this caliber? Ever. Yeah. Yeah, like, I've never had a residency before.

Well, congratulations. Thank you. So, people know you from To Pimpa Butterfly. A lot of people, at least, were introduced to you that way. But you also, you know, have a long resume from suicidal tendencies to playing with Erica Badu. But let's go to the very, very beginning. And what even made you pick up a base to begin?

begin with? Well, I think I just had a natural affinity for like swords and, you know, sticks. You know, there's like there's that one kid that, you know, like you always got to tell them to put stuff down or you're just playing a little too rough with things. There's a bit of that, but then there's also mostly my dad that inspired me because it's like growing up in a house of musicians, you know, it's not saying that, it's indirectly saying you're going to play an instrument. Like it doesn't matter, you know. It's intense, you know, and it's like, it's not, it's not, it's not always for the feign of heart. You know, you have a family that does music because everybody has an opinion, you know, everybody feels things differently. And you have to respect that. But,

you know, it's like, it's just you learn and you grow. You still grow and learn together, but it's like, it's just, it's just different. Me and my older brother would grow up playing together more than me and my younger brother. And in growing up with my older brother being, you know, that he's this virtuoso drummer, it was very intimidating, but it caused me to grow. You know, if I didn't have my brother around, I wouldn't play the way I play. So some of your early records like young jazz giants sound more in the vein of traditional jazz than, you know, as your work is FenderCat. How did you develop that sound and what would become the Thundercat voice over time?

The real thing is that I started writing music. music from my instrument. And a lot of the time when you have an instrument that you play, it becomes, it can become a bit of a role, you know, where like I was saying, you start to fall into the idea of like, I'm working, so it's cool. But I would push out a bit, you know, and because I didn't play piano, you know, because I wasn't like this guy trying to be this R&B singer, I would always create from my bass. And once I realized that that was an option, it kind of took over took on its own life. You've talked in the past about kind of your decision to play six strings versus four strings and how like in your collaborations with other artists that was kind of a

thing where people may have wanted you to play more contained or essentially to shrink yourself. So why the six string? Like what are some of the nuances of that and how has it allowed you to become the artist that you saw yourself as? It's like, you know, like I would say like sometimes when people see the six string, it's immediately intimidating or it's immediately denotes to you about to play too much. It's just like, you know, but a lot of the time I would be writing, and that would be the best tool to write with for me because it gave me the most facility. And I wouldn't always take it out with me, but I would always be playing a six string on records that I would record for myself. It didn't become a reality until I had my other

their base is stolen, where I had to take that base out, and that's where it started. So your sense of humor is such a big part of what people know of you. Like, it's in your records. It's in your interviews. Like, anytime people hear Thundercat, it's a very lighthearted kind of situation. But, you know, life gets real, and that's also in the records. And I feel like drunk was like the perfect culmination of, I'm this. funny guy, but also it's not always great. Yeah. You know, music sometimes can be like therapy.

It can be, you know, you know, soft and gentle or it can be really, you know, intense and abrasive. And I don't know, I feel like humor is for the soul. You know what I mean? Like it's, it helps you get through. Even if it hurts, it's still better to laugh, I think. One of the hardest things that I would imagine about being an artist is those tough times and the idea that you're expected to kind of process things in this very public way. Yeah. Obviously, you've dealt with a lot of loss in your lifetime. But is that something you're filling now with the recent loss of Mac and this idea that you'll be expected to somehow process this on your next record? Well, I think it's the inevitable, first of all.

It's like real life in art, you know, the imitation thing is real. I don't think it's expected. I mean, if I put out a trap album next, I would imagine that's just as expected. Fair enough. It's just, moments like that, it's just what it is. It is what it is. I can't make up for something as precious as a life lost like Max. You know, it's just, it's no way it's not going to touch different places in my life, you know.

There was a movie that came out some years ago with Denzel Washington and John Goodman, and it was about this, like, demon that would follow him through the city. Oh, fallen? You remember it. There were moments, like, after he died that felt. a bit like fallen or like they live because it was like everybody was in my personal life in that one moment and I couldn't walk down the street without somebody looking and saying I'm sorry or like trying to catch my eyes and it was a bit intense for me at first but the truth is everybody mourns

you know and Mack didn't just touch my life that was just what that was proof of and I had to see through that you know and like realize it is big again it's bigger than me you know so my processing of it is Like I said, it's going to get touched. Back to Tipin, Butterfly. Was that different than anything you've done prior? Oh, yeah. That was a very demanding moment. You know, to this day, I still think I look back on it

and I think about how much output was going on in that moment. And along with that, you know, realizing that that is, the genius of Kendrick Lamar's writing and like it's rare you know it's like a lot of the time especially in the rap game rappers get far off into thinking it's just them Kendrick was not afraid of anything like and that would inspire me all the time he would run up on all of it we would have conversations about joe henderson we have you know talk about those miles albums we talk about all kinds of stuff like that it was just this continuous dance of like, it was almost like a trust fall. It was like I didn't know where I was

going. And it was one of those things where when that album was finished, being there for the very last mastering session up until 7, 8 o'clock in the morning. And I went home. I just almost fainted and cried because it was just so, I was like I had gone as far as I felt I could. I had given as all I could. You know, if I had lost like 100 pounds, that would have made sense, you know, But it was just like, I put my all. That's what I have from that, you know. It's like, and then we look up and then it's, you know, it's like, oh, 11 Grammys. You were like, Jesus, you know what I was like?

I was going to say, did you know? Did you know it would be this? No. I didn't even have a suit on at the Grammys. It really changed jazz and improvisational music. It wasn't just the awards. It became a political statement. You see what it sparked.

As much as everybody. There's moments. moments that moments in history when we look back there's Dave Chappelle there's Barack Obama and then there's that time when Kendrick put out the pimp a butterfly and it pushed it it made people uncomfortable it made everything a bit disheveled it brought it brought the cream to the top it everything it shook everything up and I think this album is this is definitely one of those albums that when we look back it will stand the test of time of how of course you know it's just that Thank Kendrick for being the vessel, you know what I mean, like letting it happen.

Because he could have easily been like, you know, I'm going to just put out this trap album. I think you have a trap album on the way. You keep saying this. I think you're hitting. You think I'm joking. What excites you the most about the music industry right now, this moment we're in where all these types of music are kind of dialoguing with each other. And on the flip side of that, what scares you the most? Starting, you know, going a bit backwards, what scares me the most, I had this moment last night with Zach Fox, also known as Booty Math, where we were talking about this young rapper, I think it's young Melly.

Yes, Y&W. Melly. That scared the hell out of me. For those who don't know, it's a young rapper from, was it, Florida? Florida. Yeah. And, you know, he basically murdered his best. as friends. Allegedly. Yeah. Like hearing the music, it was so real.

It was just, it almost like, it sent chills up my spine. I was just like, what if this was actually his art? In his mind, this was the art to him. You know, we always talk about gangster rap and stuff like that and how volatile it was back in the 90s and 80s. But this is like real murder music. So the part where the line gets blurred like that is scary, man, because it's like the music is jamming.

Yeah. Yeah, like we, it's hands down. He can sing. He can kill it. He's rapping and it's good. So that being, you know, I will guess a darker point. I guess a more exciting point for me is the part where, I don't know, I just feel like the music is, again, is still growing and changing and flourishing and stuff like that. So I'm always, like, excited about the idea of what can't be, what we can do, what we're capable of doing.

You know, now it's trap music. Who knows what it's going to be next. Love it. Thank you so much. Absolutely. Stephen Lee Bruner, who goes by Thundercat. He spoke with Brianna Younger, a music editor at The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick, and that's the show for today.

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