Frank Durgin, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College, will present a talk, "The Cognitive Science of Racism: Anchoring, Familiarity, and Metaphor."

Abstract: Racism and prejudice are ubiquitous, and have recently leapt once again to prominence in political dialog. What can cognitive science tell us about the origins and possible remedies for this aspect of human cognition?

In this talk I will review old and new evidence from cognitive science pointing to how the evolved structuring of social perception and linguistic cognition may foster and exacerbate racism and other biases. I will start from the so-called "other race" effect in face perception, and go on to discuss the consequences of judgmental anchoring effects.

The core of my talk will be on work from my lab on metaphors that analogize between physical properties and psychological properties. Systems of metaphor can aid cognition, but can also give the illusion of truth to strong intergroup biases associated with such labels as race and sexual orientation.

In particular I will show how online measures of implicit bias seem to be measuring something that is much more deeply embedded in our languages than the individual biases they are frequently portrayed as measuring.