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The Science of Implicit Bias is one of the most promising fields for animating the human change that makes social change possible.

And the social psychologist, Mazarin Benagy, is one of its primary architects.

She's helping us see how the mind is a difference-seeking machine.

And in this way, it helps us order and navigate what could be the overwhelming complexity of reality.

Yet this same gift creates blind spots and biases as we fill in what we don't know with the limits of what we do know.

This is science that takes our grappling with difference out of the realm of guilt and into the realm of transformative good.

I don't want people to not learn from guilt and not learn from shame. I think those are powerful motives.

They have made us, in large part, the more civilized people we are.

But I do believe that in our culture and in many cultures, we are at a point where our conscious minds are so ahead of our less conscious minds.

We must recognize that and yet ask people the question,

are you the good person you yourself want to be?

And the answer to that is, no, you're not. And that's just the fact and we need to deal with that if we want to be on the path of self-improvement.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on Being.

Mazarene Benaji is a professor of social ethics in the psychology department at Harvard University.

She's the co-author of Blind Spot, Hidden Biasis of Good People.

And she's the creator of the Implicit Association Test, which has been taken by over 17 million people.

She was born in India and raised in the town of Sekunda Abad.

I spoke with her in 2016.

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