Archive for the ‘News and Topical Issues’ category

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American Indian mascots are a popular choice for sports teams. Controversy has raged, however, about whether such mascots encourage stereotypes about native Americans. New research suggests that there may be a problem of another sort entirely — the use of these mascots seems to increase stereotyping of other groups. The implications of the research are [...]

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Tavis Smiley’s interview with me about The Hidden Brain is scheduled to air tonight — Tuesday, March 23 — on public television stations nationwide on The Tavis Smiley Show. Please tune in.
The interview took place last week in Los Angeles on the eve of a meeting Tavis Smiley convened over the weekend in Chicago to debate [...]

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Joseph Stack, the Texas man who burned his house down and then recently flew a plane into an IRS building, killing one person, has some stark similarities to the the suicide bomber I write about in The Hidden Brain. Like Stack, Larry Layton was white and American — which apparently makes it difficult for some [...]

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I spent some time in the interview talking about an unconscious bias I discovered in my own three year-old daughter. Before she could tie her own shoelaces, she had already come to the conclusion that nurses always have to be women, and that doctors usually have to be men. Where do you think this bias [...]

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Listen to an interview about The Hidden Brain conducted by the Diane Rehm show. The show was guest-hosted by the immensely talented Susan Page of USA Today, and featured a discussion that ranged from how to reform our criminal justice system to same-sex attraction among Visigoths. Sorry, I can’t say more. You’ll just have to [...]

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NPR’s flagship news program, MORNING EDITION, has featured The Hidden Brain in an interview.
You can read about it and listen to the interview using this link.
If you have trouble accessing the site, you can download an MP3 file of the interview here.

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The Supreme Court recently lifted limits on private organizations creating campaign ads, and argued that such restrictions infringed on the First Amendment rights of individuals and organizations.
Much of the ruling’s rationale is based on the idea that humans do much or all of their thinking consciously. At a conscious level, it makes sense that more [...]

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One of the things I always find striking after a major natural disaster such as the recent earthquake in Haiti is how religious believers and non-believers quickly reach diametrically opposing conclusions about the implications of the disaster. For non-believers, natural disasters are evidence that God does not exist — for what kind of benevolent, just [...]

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I have an oped in the New York Times today discussing an issue that I explore at length in the book — the problem of colorism. Most people think about racial prejudice as being merely about how whites think about blacks, but the reality is far more complicated and nuanced. The issue is not [...]

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The New York Times review of The Hidden Brain appears this weekend. You can read it here. Here is how it begins:
Invisible forces that control our behavior have inspired our best story­tellers, from Euripides to Steven Spielberg. Whether we’re yanked around by jealous gods, Oedipal urges or poltergeists, the idea that we feel powerless to [...]