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I know my own mind.
I am able to assess others in a fair and accurate way.
These self-perceptions are challenged by leading psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald as they explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality.
“Blindspot” is the authors’ metaphor for the portion of the mind that houses hidden biases. Writing with simplicity and verve, Banaji and Greenwald question the extent to which our perceptions of social groups—without our awareness or conscious control—shape our likes and dislikes and our judgments about people’s character, abilities, and potential.
In Blindspot, the authors reveal hidden biases based on their experience with the Implicit Association Test, a method that has revolutionized the way scientists learn about the human mind and that gives us a glimpse into what lies within the metaphoric blindspot.
The title’s “good people” are those of us who strive to align our behavior with our intentions. The aim of Blindspot is to explain the science in plain enough language to help well-intentioned people achieve that alignment. By gaining awareness, we can adapt beliefs and behavior and “outsmart the machine” in our heads so we can be fairer to those around us. Venturing into this book is an invitation to understand our own minds.
Brilliant, authoritative, and utterly accessible, Blindspot is a book that will challenge and change readers for years to come.
Praise for Blindspot
“Conversational . . . easy to read, and best of all, it has the potential, at least, to change the way you think about yourself.”—Leonard Mlodinow, The New York Review of Books
“Accessible and authoritative . . . While we may not have much power to eradicate our own prejudices, we can counteract them. The first step is to turn a hidden bias into a visible one. . . . What if we’re not the magnanimous people we think we are?”—The Washington Post
“Banaji and Greenwald deserve a major award for writing such a lively and engaging book that conveys an important message: Mental processes that we are not aware of can affect what we think and what we do. Blindspot is one of the most illuminating books ever written on this topic.”—Elizabeth F. Loftus, Ph.D., distinguished professor, University of California, Irvine; past president, Association for Psychological Science; author of Eyewitness Testimony
“A wonderfully cogent, socially relevant, and engaging book that helps us think smarter and more humanely. This is psychological science at its best, by two of its shining stars.”—David G. Myers, professor, Hope College, and author of Intuition: Its Powers and Perils
“[The authors’] work has revolutionized social psychology, proving that—unconsciously—people are affected by dangerous stereotypes.”—Psychology Today
“An accessible and persuasive account of the causes of stereotyping and discrimination . . . Banaji and Greenwald will keep even nonpsychology students engaged with plenty of self-examinations and compelling elucidations of case studies and experiments.”—Publishers Weekly
“A stimulating treatment that should help readers deal with irrational biases that they would otherwise consciously reject.”—Kirkus Reviews
- Sales Rank: #32048 in Books
- Published on: 2013-02-12
- Released on: 2013-02-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.58" h x 1.07" w x 6.40" l, 1.03 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 272 pages
Review
“Conversational . . . easy to read, and best of all, it has the potential, at least, to change the way you think about yourself.”—Leonard Mlodinow, The New York Review of Books
“Accessible and authoritative . . . While we may not have much power to eradicate our own prejudices, we can counteract them. The first step is to turn a hidden bias into a visible one. . . . What if we’re not the magnanimous people we think we are?”—The Washington Post
“Banaji and Greenwald deserve a major award for writing such a lively and engaging book that conveys an important message: Mental processes that we are not aware of can affect what we think and what we do. Blindspot is one of the most illuminating books ever written on this topic.”—Elizabeth F. Loftus, Ph.D., distinguished professor, University of California, Irvine; past president, Association for Psychological Science; author of Eyewitness Testimony
“A wonderfully cogent, socially relevant, and engaging book that helps us think smarter and more humanely. This is psychological science at its best, by two of its shining stars.”—David G. Myers, professor, Hope College, and author of Intuition: Its Powers and Perils
“[The authors’] work has revolutionized social psychology, proving that—unconsciously—people are affected by dangerous stereotypes.”—Psychology Today
“An accessible and persuasive account of the causes of stereotyping and discrimination . . . Banaji and Greenwald will keep even nonpsychology students engaged with plenty of self-examinations and compelling elucidations of case studies and experiments.”—Publishers Weekly
“A stimulating treatment that should help readers deal with irrational biases that they would otherwise consciously reject.”—Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, collaborators for more than thirty years, are kindred spirits in their search to understand how the mind operates in social contexts. Banaji teaches at Harvard University, Greenwald at the University of Washington. With their colleague Brian Nosek, they are co-developers of the Implicit Association Test, a method that transformed them, their research, and their field of inquiry. In this book, for the first time, research evidence from their labs and from the more than fourteen million completed tests at implicit.harvard.edu is made available to the general reader.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Mindbugs
It is an ordinary day on a college campus. Students and professors of experimental psychology have filed into a lecture hall to listen to a distinguished visiting scientist explain how our minds perceive the physical world. Nothing about his tweed jacket and unkempt hair suggests the challenge he is about to deliver. A few minutes into the lecture, he says matter-of-factly, “As you can see, the two tabletops are exactly the same in shape and size.”
Shuffling in their seats, some in the audience frown while others smile in embarrassment because, as anyone can plainly see, he is dead wrong. Some tilt their heads from side to side, to test if a literal shift in perspective will help. Others wonder whether they should bother staying for the lecture if this nonsense is just the start.
The nonbelievers are caught short, though, when the speaker proceeds to show the truth of his audacious claim. Using an overhead projector, he takes a transparent plastic sheet containing only a single red parallelogram, lays it over the tabletop on the left, and shows that it fits perfectly. He then rotates the plastic sheet clockwise, and places the parallelogram over the tabletop on the right; it fits perfectly there as well. An audible gasp fills the hall as the speaker moves the red frame back and forth, and the room breaks into laugher. With nothing more than a faint smile the speaker goes on to complete his lecture on how the eye receives, the brain registers, and the mind interprets visual information.
Unconvinced? You can try the test yourself. Find some paper thin enough to trace the outline of one of the tabletops, and then move the outline over to the other tabletop. If you don’t find that the shape of the first tabletop fits identically onto the second tabletop, there can be only one explanation—you’ve botched the tracing job, because the table surfaces are precisely the same.
But how can this be?
Visual Mindbugs
You, like us, have just succumbed to a famous visual illusion, one that produces an error in the mind’s ability to perceive a pair of objects as they actually are. We will call such errors mindbugs—ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason, and make decisions.1
The psychologist Roger Shepard, a genius who has delighted in the art of confounding, created this illusion called Turning the Tables. When we look at the images of the two table surfaces, our retinas do, in fact, receive them as identical in shape and size. In other words, the retina “sees” the tabletops quite accurately. However, when the eye transmits that information to the brain’s visual cortex, where depth is perceived, the trouble begins.
The incorrect perception that the two tabletops are strikingly different in shape occurs effortlessly, because the brain automatically converts the 2-D image that exists both on the page and on the retina into a 3-D interpretation of the tabletop shapes as they must be in the natural world. The automatic processes of the mind, in other words, impose the third dimension of depth onto this scene. And the conscious, reflective processes of the mind accept the illusion unquestioningly. So much so that when encountering the speaker’s assertion that the tabletop outlines are the same, the conscious mind’s first reaction is to consider it to be sheer nonsense.
Natural selection has endowed the minds of humans and other large animals to operate successfully in a three-dimensional world. Having no experience in a world other than a 3-D one, the brain we have continues to perform its conscious perceptual corrections of the tables’ dimensions to make them appear as they would in the traditional 3-D world.2
Contrary to expectation, this error reflects not a weakness of adaptation but rather a triumph, for Shepard’s tabletops highlight the success of a visual system that has adapted effectively to the combination of a two-dimensional retina inside the eye and a three-dimensional world outside. The mind’s automatic understanding of the data is so confident that, as Shepard puts it, “any knowledge or understanding of the illusion we may gain at the intellectual level remains virtually powerless to diminish the magnitude of the illusion.” Take a look at the tables again. The knowledge you now have (that the tables have identical surfaces) has no corrective effect in diminishing the illusion!3
Disconcerting as this experience is, it serves as a vivid illustration of a signal property of the mind—it does a great deal of its work automatically, unconsciously, and unintentionally. Mention of the mind’s unconscious operation may summon up for you a visual memory of the bearded, cigar-smoking Sigmund Freud, who rightly gets credit for having brought the term unconscious into everyday use. However, an understanding of the unconscious workings of the mind has changed greatly in the century since Freud’s pathbreaking observations. Freud portrayed an omniscient unconscious with complex motives that shape important aspects of human mind and behavior—from dreams to memories to madness, and ultimately to civilization itself. Today, however, Freud’s arguments, detached as they have remained from scientific verification, have a greatly reduced impact on scientific understanding of unconscious mental life.
Instead, the modern conception of the unconscious mind must be credited to another historical figure, one far less known than Freud. A nineteenth-century German physicist and physiologist, Hermann von Helmholtz, offered the name unbewußter Schluß, or unconscious inference, to describe how an illusion like Shepard’s tabletops might work.4 Helmholtz aimed to describe the means by which the mind creates from physical data the conscious perceptions that define our ordinary and subjective experiences of “seeing.” Our visual system is capable of being tricked by a simple 2-D image, because an unconscious mental act replaces the 2-D shape of the retinal image with a consciously perceived 3-D shape of the inferred object it suggests.
Now try this: Read the following sixteen words with sufficiently close attention so that you can expect to be able to recognize them when you see them again a few pages hence:
Ant
Spider
Feelers
Web
Fly
Poison
Slimy
Crawl
Bee
Wing
Bug
Small
Bite
Fright
Wasp
Creepy
In the meantime, here’s another striking example of unconscious inference in the form of a checkerboard and cylinder to confound us further. When we tell you that the squares marked A and B are exactly the same in their coloring, you will doubtless believe us to be wrong. But take a thick piece of opaque paper, one large enough to cover the entire picture, mark with a point the two squares labeled A and B, and make a circular hole just a bit smaller than the checkerboard square on which each sits. When you look only through the holes and without the rest of the image, you will see that they are indeed identical in color.
Again the culprit is an unconscious inference, a mindbug that automatically goes to work on the image. What causes this remarkable failure of perception? Several features of this checkerboard image are involved, but let us attend to the most obvious ones. First of all, notice that B is surrounded by several dark squares that make it look lighter than it is, merely by contrast; likewise, just the opposite, A is surrounded by adjacent lighter squares that make it seem darker than it actually is. Second, notice the shadow being cast by the cylinder. This darkens the squares within the shadow—including the one marked B—but the mind automatically undoes this darkening to correct for the shadow, lightening our conscious experience of B.
As with the table illusion, the mechanisms that produce this one also exist to enable us to see and understand the world successfully. Ted Adelson, a vision scientist at MIT and creator of this checkershadow image, writes: “As with many so-called illusions, this effect really demonstrates the success rather than the failure of the visual system. The visual system is not very good at being a physical light meter, but that is not its purpose.”5 Such examples force us to ask a more general question: To what extent do our minds possess efficient and accurate methods that fail us so miserably when we put them to use in a slightly revised context?
Memory Mindbugs
Think back to the words you memorized earlier, as you examine the list below. As you review each word, without turning back to the original list, try to recall whether each word you see here also appeared in the list you read earlier. If you have paper and pencil handy, and to avoid any doubt about your answers, copy all the words you recall seeing on the previous list and leave out any word that, by your recollection, did not appear before.
Maple Ant Poison Fly Stem Berry Feelers Slimy Birch Wing Leaves Tree Roots Bite Web Bug Small Oak Crawl Acorn Wasp Branch Insect Bee Willow Fright Spider Pine Creepy
To be correct, you should have left out all twelve tree-related words, starting with maple and ending with pine, for indeed, none of the tree words appeared on the earlier list. You should have also written down all the insect-related words, except one—the word insect itself! That word was not on the original list. If, as is quite likely, you included the word insect as one you’d seen before, you have demonstrated a powerful but ordinary mindbug that can create false memories.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see the basis for the false memory for insect. The mind is an automatic association-making machine. When it encounters any information—words, pictures, or even complex ideas—related information automatically comes to mind. In this case, the words in the original list had an insect theme. Unthinkingly, we use that shared theme as we try to remember the past and, in so doing, stumble easily when we come across the word insect itself. Such a memory error is called a false alarm—we mistakenly remember something that actually did not occur.
In a study conducted at Washington University, 82 percent of the time students remembered seeing words that shared a theme—say, insects—but were not on the original lists. That huge percentage of error is especially remarkable when compared to the 75 percent correct memory for words that were actually on the list! In other words, mindbugs can be powerful enough to produce greater recollection of things that didn’t occur than of things that did occur.6
The errors witnessed so far may not seem terribly consequential. What’s the harm, after all, in misremembering a word? But imagine being interrogated about a potential suspect in a crime you have witnessed. Could the false-memory mindbug interfere with your accuracy in reporting what you saw? If the suspect bears some resemblance to the criminal—for example, has a similar beard—might a false identification result? If so, with what probability?
Elizabeth Loftus is among psychology’s most creative experimentalists. Now at the University of California at Irvine, she has made it her life’s work to study memory mindbugs in eyewitnesses by presenting simulated burglaries, car accidents, and other common mishaps and then testing people’s memories of them. She has found not only that errors in these eyewitness memories are disturbingly frequent but also that even slight changes in the way in which the witness is prompted during questioning to remember an event can alter the content of what is remembered.
In one famous study, Loftus showed witnesses scenes from an automobile accident in which two cars had collided with no personal injury. Later she asked half the witnesses, “How fast was the car going when it hit the other car?” She asked the other half, “How fast was the car going when it smashed into the other car?” Those who were asked the “smashed” question gave higher estimates of the speed of the vehicle, compared to those who were asked the “hit” question, in addition to which they were more likely to mistakenly insert a memory of broken glass at the accident scene even though there was none in what they saw.7
Psychologists call this mindbug retroactive interference—an influence of after-the-experience information on memory. Loftus gave this a more memorable name: the misinformation effect. Her point is that a small change in language can produce a consequential change in what is remembered, often resulting in mistaken testimony by eyewitnesses who relied on mistaken information.
In recent years it has become clear that the number of wrongful convictions produced by eyewitness errors is substantial.8 From the efforts of the Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted through DNA testing, 250 people so far have been exonerated by conclusive tests that confirmed their innocence. Of these, 190 cases had been decided based on a mistaken eyewitness account. In other words, in nearly 75 percent of the cases of wrongful conviction, the failure of eyewitness memory (assuming no malign intent on the part of the witness to wrongfully convict) was responsible for tragedies that many societies believe to be so intolerable that their laws explicitly err on the side of allowing the guilty to walk free.
Availability and Anchoring: Two Famous Mindbugs
Pick the correct answer in each of the three pairs: Each year, do more people in the United States die from cause (a) or cause (b)?
1. (a) murder (b) diabetes
2. (a) murder (b) suicide
3. (a) car accidents (b) abdominal cancer
Most of us give the answer (b) for question 1 and (a) for questions 2 and 3; when in fact the correct answer to each question is (b). In other words, we get the first one right but not the next two. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky named and described the generic version of this mindbug, calling it the availability heuristic. When instances of one type of event (such as death by murder rather than suicide) come more easily to mind than those of another type, we tend to assume that the first event also must occur more frequently in the world. Murder is more likely to receive media attention than suicide, not to mention that the stigma of suicide makes it less likely to be information that is shared beyond the family. Car accidents are likewise more likely to be mentioned because of their shocking nature, whereas abdominal cancer is one of many kinds of cancer, a common cause of death. Because murder and car accidents come to mind more easily, they are wrongly assumed to occur more frequently. This is seemingly reasonable, but it can lead us to overestimate car accident deaths. However, greater ease of availability to the mind doesn’t mean greater frequency of occurrence in the world. These kinds of mistakes occur routinely, and are often accompanied with great decision costs.9
Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, asked students at MIT to write down the last two digits of their Social Security number on a piece of paper. He then asked them to estimate the price of a keyboard, a trackball, or a design book, items easily familiar to MIT students. Ariely collected these two numbers from each person and then computed the correlation between them, looking for a possible relation between the two digits of the Social Security number and the estimated prices. Logically, of course, there is no connection between the two sets of numbers, so the correlation should have been at or close to zero.
In fact, Ariely discovered that there was a substantial correlation between the two sets of numbers. Those for whom the last two digits of their Social Security number happened to lie between 00 and 19 said they would pay $8.62 on average for the trackball; those with digits between 20 and 39 were willing to pay more, $11.82; those with digits between 40 and 59 offered up even more, $13.45; and the poor souls whose Social Security numbers happened to end in digits from 60 to 79 and 80 to 99 offered to pay $21.18 and $26.18—all for the very same object!10
This, the second of the two famous mindbugs, was discovered by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who called it anchoring, to capture the idea that the mind doesn’t search for information in a vacuum.11 Rather, it starts by using whatever information is immediately available as a reference point or “anchor” and then adjusting. The result, in this case of the random-digit anchor, was the potentially self-harming penalty of being willing to pay too much.
Those who fall prey to the availability and anchoring heuristics are not more feeble-minded or gullible than others. Each of us is an ever-ready victim. Property values can be altered by manipulated price anchors that inflate or deflate the actual price. The valuation of stocks can be influenced more by their suggested market price than actual value, perhaps providing some of the explanation for the persistence of financial bubbles.12
Most helpful customer reviews
72 of 77 people found the following review helpful.
Tiresomely Stereotypical
By Craig Stephans
Blindspot promises to uncover hidden biases of "Good People." Unfortunately, it just unfolds what has been published ad nauseam in recent decades...the same stuff anyone who would be interested in reading this book has most likely already learned through several means. Studies and reports have indicated through surveys, association tests, etc etc that people have biases. There is nothing new here besides the data of several testing procedures that show biases.
I had hoped that Blindspot might show some creativity and risk taking in showing blindspots that have not been previously discussed or revealed; however, what is discussed are basically the following biases: white v. black, male v. female, heterosexual v. homosexual, and young v. old. (If you are not aware these biases might exist, then you should read this book.) There is nothing outside the box here. Sure the data and findings are supported and relevant, but it is not news. What about something surprising like biases that are not everyday fodder in the media and culture. The authors fail to delve into biases outside those generally labeled as "politically correct."
Are biases ever correct and useful, even life-saving? Do we sometimes ignore our intuition to ill-effect to avoid seeming biased? What is the danger of overcompensating for biases in our culture? The authors avoid these and similar more difficult and innovative questions.
It would have been interesting, for example, for the authors to examine how biases and blindspots are constantly being manipulated, developed, and taken advantage of in our everyday lives in the media, by politicians, educators, advertisers, etc. More discussion about how to identify and correct biases of various types would have been welcome too.
I had hoped to learn about unknown presuppositions and biases that people have that undermine their own objectivity in various arenas; however, all that is on the authors' agenda are the biases that I assume everyone knows about already---but, hey, maybe I'm just biased.
70 of 77 people found the following review helpful.
Great analysis of testing to uncover unacknowledged biases
By Kurt Conner
Your brain associates concepts, and it doesn't always tell you. Drs. Banaji and Greenwald give a great illustration to introduce the testing method that forms the basis for most of this book: imagine that you have a deck of shuffled cards, and you're told to separate them into two piles. Hearts and Diamonds go to your left, and Spades and Clubs go to your right. You can probably do that really quickly, without even having to think, since your brain can just associate the pairs into "Red goes left, Black goes right" - but if you have a different command, like Hearts and Spades go to the left, and Diamonds and Clubs go to the right, you will have to slow down a little. It's not that you can't make up an easy rule or that the question is hard, it's just that your brain has been trained to make an easy association among suits of the same color, so you have to put in just a little more thought when grouping ideas that seem to have less in common.
On this principle, the authors explore the Implicit Association Test to determine what other concepts people's brains have developed in associated groups. For example, you may see a list of words, and for every word that is either a Flower or a Pleasant word, you mark the circle on the left, and for every word that is a Bug or an Unpleasant word, you mark the circle on the right. More likely than not, you will be a little faster at this task than if the words were grouped differently. Where the test gets interesting and psychologically useful, of course, is where it touches on issues of race/gender/age/sexuality/etc. Most people, especially in the relatively sophisticated target audience of this book, honestly insist that they do not discriminate, so the benefit of this testing method is that it unearths biases about which the subject is unaware. If your brain takes a little longer to group, say, a traditionally feminine name with a career word, as opposed to a domestic word, you may have some gender bias affecting your actions and decisions in ways you don't realize.
I was familiar with this testing method before I started reading the book, since Dr. Sam Sommers uses it in Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World, but I was pleasantly surprised to see how thoroughly these authors explored the implications of what the test has shown over the last twenty years or so. There are real links between implicit preferences for one race over another and subtle discrimination (like a doctor's bedside manner), and the scientific community is just beginning to develop experiments to learn more. The book definitely made me ask myself hard questions and look for my own blind spots, and it is certainly a good read for anyone interested in issues of equality.
Where I think the book falters a bit, understandably, is that it is very descriptive without being prescriptive. The authors are candid about this aspect of the book, almost apologizing for conclusions that boil down to, "We can show scientifically that people discriminate even when they don't know they're doing it. We just don't know how to fix that." Certainly, there are a few solutions offered (when an orchestra began holding blind auditions, for example, the gender ratio among accepted musicians became much more even, and students who take math classes from female professors are able to significantly increase their implicit associations between women and math), but I get the sense that we are still a few significant studies away from a book with large-scale concrete solutions to the problems described in this volume. I have hope that such a book is on the way someday, so for now, I can recommend this book for a thorough and patient analysis of the problem while we wait for the book to suggest more solutions.
38 of 45 people found the following review helpful.
gain insight into the human mind with this intelligent, enjoyable, easy read
By Todd B. Kashdan
Its easy to accept the idea that the majority of brain activity linked to our physical body occurs outside of conscious awareness (getting out of bed in the middle of the night to urinate, driving home from work with no memory of the trip); its difficult to accept the idea that our attitudes and values have a profound influence on how we treat other people but most of this occurs outside of conscious awareness. The scientific evidence on the latter, and the implications of this work, is at the core of this book. If you are interested in the rapid, relatively automatic social judgments that underlie stereotypes, first impressions, prejudice, benevolence, racism, sexism, and ageism, then you need to read this book.
The authors are the world leading experts on the rapid, non-conscious judgments that people make about other people and themselves. Measures of these automatic/implicit/non-conscious mental processes increased exponentially as a result of their groundbreaking work. Readers unfamiliar with their research are offered a number of different tests where they can assess their own hidden biases. I suspect many readers will be surprised, intrigued, and entertained by these assessment devices. They add a new dimension to understanding the subtleties of how one can be vehement about liberal egalitarian values but still hold non-conscious preferences for young white heterosexual men.
The chapters are brief and the prose is fluid. There are virtually no redundancies in this small volume. Unlike most psychologists and behavioral economists, Banaji and Greenwald do not go into painstaking detail about the methodology of specific studies. Instead, they offer deep insight into why it is essential to do something other than interview or give surveys to determine a person's social attitudes. Great detail is given on how you can assess people's non-conscious attitudes about diverse topics such as the dangerousness of black men, the heroic savoir status of romantic partners, and the qualities of a real American.
Several of the findings are fascinating. For instance, the average person is more likely to automatically link Hugh Grant (a white Brit) than Connie Chung (born in Washington, DC) with the concept of being a true American. Automatic or unconscious gender stereotypes are held more strongly by women, not men. One scientist found that by simply adding feminine pictures, colors, and furniture to a computer science classroom, young women's automatic tendency to equate men more strongly with math and science skills can be neutralized (for a little while).
The nearly 20 page appendix on "are americans racist?" is valuable enough to be a stand alone purchase.
The only complaint I might raise is that some of the research detailed in the book are old hat for those of us that read a large number of non-fiction psychology books. Eye witness testimony work by Elizabeth Loftus, imprinting work by Konrad Lorenz, experiments by Henri Tajfel where he used meaningless categories to divide teenagers into groups to understand discrimination, etc. But this is a minor detail as everything is described succinctly, fitting squarely into the overarching theme of each chapter.
A book that needed to be written. One that raises more questions than answers, which is exactly what I tend to look for in my scientific odyssey.
cheers,
Todd
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