Where unfairness begins.

The truth about stereotypes.

Psychologists once believed that only intolerant people used stereotypes. Now the study of unconscious bias is revealing the unsettling truth. We all use stereotypes, all the time, without knowing it. We have met the enemy of equality, and the enemy is us.

Yet if we all took are own tests of unconscious unfairness. What’s known as automatic or implicit stereotyping, which, we find, we do all the time without knowing it. Though out and out intolerance may be on the decline, if anything, stereotyping is a bigger problem than we ever imagined.

Previously, researchers who studied stereotyping had simply asked people to record their feelings about minority groups, social discrimination and had used their answers as an index of their attitudes. Psychologists now understand that these conscious replies are only half the story. How progressive a person seems to be on the surface bears little or no relation to how prejudiced he or she is on an unconscious level so that a person with an open-minded person might harbour just as many biases as a BNP person.

As surprising as these findings are, they confirmed the hunches of many people of human behaviour. "Twenty years ago, psychologist put forward that there were people who said they were not prejudiced but who really did have unconscious negative stereotypes and beliefs. It was like speculating about the existence of a virus, and then one day seeing it under a microscope.

It presents the subject of equality with a series of positive or negative adjectives, each paired with a typically "white" or "black" name. As the name and word appear together on a computer screen, the person taking the test presses a key, indicating whether the word is good or bad. Meanwhile, the computer records the speed of each response.

A glance at subjects' response times reveals a startling trend. Most people who participate in the experiment even some African-Americans respond more quickly when a positive word is paired with a white name or a negative word with a black name. Because our minds are more familiar to making these associations, says Psychologist, we process them more rapidly.

Though the words and names aren't hidden, they are presented so quickly that a subject's ability to make deliberate choices is diminished allowing his or her underlying assumptions to show through. The same technique can be used to measure stereotypes about many different social groups, such as Gays, Bisexual, Lesbians, Transsexuals, Women, and the older people, young people, Disabled people, and other social groups.

• What is your unfairness based on?
• Does it matter?
• What do you think?