Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People

“Rather than an effect of visual perception, this book focuses on another type of blindspot, one that contains a large set of biases and keeps them hidden.”

After introducing the notion of visual blind spots, the authors explain that they spend the book focusing on the idea of mental blindspots, which influence our perception of everyday life. Like visual blind spots, these perceptual blindspots often go unnoticed and undetected in our daily lives but can greatly influence our behavior. They are comprised of our hidden biases and can dramatically affect how we interact with others and the choices we make about them and ourselves. The authors aim to show how and why these hidden-bias blindspots are recognized by the scientific community.

“A quarter century ago, many psychologists believed that human behavior was primarily guided by conscious thoughts and feelings. Nowadays the majority will readily agree that much human judgment and behavior is produced with little conscious thought.”

The authors demonstrate that over the past few decades understandings of the unconscious mind have changed dramatically among the scientific community. After having fallen out of favor in the 20th century, they have been revitalized and updated in recent history. Psychologists now primarily agree that much of what we do is guided by our unconscious thoughts. Mindbugs, as a part of our unconscious behavioral repertoire, fit into these current understandings and help shed further light onto how the unconscious mind works.