Parrhesia
Baki Mumkaya
The shooting of Michael Brown, Indiana's enactment of a religious freedom bill, and Tyler Clementi’s suicide are just a few recent indications of threats to civil rights. However, if you look at the media on any given day, you will find that there is no shortage of opinions supporting religious freedom and equality. In order to understand the cause of these instances, it is necessary to go back to the concept of Otherness. In Social Psychology, Otherness is a utilitarian one that deems it necessary for the establishment of one’s subjective self by establishing what the person is not. Collecting information about categories is essential to our survival, but we sometimes go too far. The reason is that we are actually discriminating unintentionally – we do 98% of our thinking in our subconscious mind. And that’s where we collect and store Implicit Biases. Scientist Tony Greenwald (University of Washington), Mahzarin Banaji (Harvard University), and Brian Nosek (University of Virginia) founded a multi-university collaboration in 1998 to investigate thought and feelings that exist outside of conscious awareness or conscious control. Parrhesia is a web application that uses their questions to provide its users an anonymous and public insight into their implicit biases. It does not try to find out if you are biased, but rather to measure the strength of a person's automatic associations under the assumption that everyone is biased, even if they have never done anything biased.