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An Introduction to

Implicit Bias

Jacob Berger, Ph.D.Department of English and Philosophy

James Stoutenborough, Ph.D.Department of Political Science

Diversity BrownbagSeptember 5th, 2018

Attitudes in General

People plainly have attitudes towards

things.

You may like the movie Star Wars, or not.

Attitudes in General

Some attitudes are biases.

A bias is a (dis)favoring of X’s simply by virtue of their being X’s.

Implicit BiasMany now worry that people often harbor

so-called ‘implicit biases’.

These are often thought to involve racial, ethnic, gendered, or other kinds of

social bias.

Implicit BiasWhat’s striking about these attitudes is that

people seem to be unaware of them.

That is, they seem to be unconscious or implicit.

Ways to Measure Attitudes

There are two main ways to experimentally

measure attitudes.

An explicit measure involves eliciting (verbal) reports

about an attitude.

Ways to Measure Attitudes

An implicit measure using nonverbal cues to

assess attitudes.

The most common implicit measure of

social bias is the implicit-association test

(“IAT”).

(e.g., Greenwald et al 1998)

Ways to Measure Attitudes

To demonstrate implicit bias, we often look for dissociations between

explicit and implicit measures.

There is much striking evidence, including, e.g.,

weapon and resume priming.

(e.g., Hofmann et al 2005)

Ways to Measure Attitudes

You may wish to take an IAT yourself:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/

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Why is this

troubling?

Worries about Implicit Bias A serious concern is that such implicit biases could

predict and explain much biased behavior.

Evidence suggests, e.g., that implicit biases correlate with support for racist political positions.

(e.g., Perez 2010)

Worries about Implicit Bias Indeed, implicit bias seem to effect many spheres of

life, including:

(see, e.g., Qian et al 2017)

Education

Healthcare

Justice

Employment

Finance

Dating

Worries about Implicit Bias The bad effects of such biased behaviors may

compound over time.

Suppose five equally meritorious employees are given different rates of annual raises due to implicit bias:

(Alfano 2018, pp. 61ff)

K

62 Responsibility

Alfano_2243—Moral Psychology

every year. The employees all receive raises, though, and out of decorum they don’t brag about how much they’re earning, so they all feel (at least for a while) that they’ve been fairly treated. After the first annual raise, the lowest-paid employee is now earning $50,500, whereas the highest-paid employee receives $52,000. The difference is just fifteen hundred bucks over the course of the year. After taxes, that’s just a couple of lattes per day. No big deal, right? But watch what happens over the course of a 40-year career – see table 2.2. By the end of year five, the highest earner is pulling down 21 percent more than the lowest earner. By year twenty, the highest earner receives more than double the lowest earner. By the ends of their careers, the differences are stark. The lowest earner is vastly outpaced even by the other victim, receives less than half what the fairly treated employee makes, and is out-earned by almost 400 percent by the most favored employee. And that’s just the difference in their incomes. Assuming that they each invested 10 percent of their income each year and made market returns on their invest-ments, the differences in their wealth will be vast indeed.12

The other recipe is a little harder to envisage, but we can get a feel for it by modeling it as the number of times an individual can expect to be mistakenly brutalized by the police over the course of their lifetime. Suppose (falsely) that law enforcement officers never mistakenly brutalize children below the age of 12 or adults above the age of 62. That means each of us has fifty years of potential victimization. In a given year, someone may be available for interac-tion with the police (walking past them while they’re on patrol, being seen by them on security footage, driving past or near them on a highway, etc.) 200 times. That means people have on average 10,000 chances, over the course of a lifetime, to have an unfortunate interaction with the cops.14

Table 2.2 Yearly salaries for victims and beneficiaries of implicit bias

Annual raise13

Y0 Y1 Y2 Y5 Y10 Y20 Y30 Y40

1% $50,000 $50,500 $51,005 $52,551 $55,231 $61,010 $67,342 $74,4432% $50,000 $51,000 $52,020 $55,204 $60,950 $74,297 $90,568 $110,4023% $50,000 $51,500 $53,045 $57,964 $67,196 $90,306 $121,363 $163,1024% $50,000 $52,000 $54,080 $60,833 $74,012 $109,556 $162,170 $240,0515% $50,000 $52,500 $55,125 $63,814 $81,447 $132,665 $216,097 $352,000

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What, if anything,

can be done?

Modulating Implicit Bias

One problem is that implicit biases are easily inculcated.

Simply telling participants negative

things about a fictitious group

generates implicit bias.

(Gregg et al 2006)

Modulating Implicit Bias

By contrast, implicit biases seem quite

resistant to explicit reasoning.

Calling people’s attention to their

irrational biases does little to change them; even renouncing them

is ineffective.

(Gregg et al 2006)

Modulating Implicit Bias

But, while mere exposure is a questionable remedy, exposure plus some kind of training intervention

seems to lessen implicit bias.

(e.g., Qian et al 2017)

Modulating Implicit Bias

The hope that we can limit implicit bias has led many organizations to require training in implicit bias and

how to counter it.

(e.g., Goldhill 2017)

Modulating Implicit Bias

“I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think, unfortunately, too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each

other. And therefore, I thinkwe need all of us to be asking hard

questions about, you know, why am I feeling this way?”

Hillary ClintonFirst Presidential Debate of 2016

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But…

Is Implicit Bias Real?

Though the existence of implicit bias is both intuitive and seemingly explanatory, it is controversial….

There seem to be two broad criticisms of IAT-type experimental research.

Is Implicit Bias Real?First, there is a question

whether or not these attitudes are really biasing.

While IAT results are correlated with minor behaviors such as gaze

times, recent meta-analyses suggest they do not predict much biased

behavior.

(e.g., Oswald et al 2013)

Is Implicit Bias Real?Second, there is a

question whether or not these attitudes are really

implicit.

There is evidence, e.g., that people are quite

adept at predicting the results of their IATs, suggesting they are

aware of their biases.

(e.g., Hahn et al 2014)

Is Implicit Bias Real?

But even if we can be aware of our biases

occasionally, this does not show that they are

not implicit.

Likewise, implicit biases may be weak, but nonetheless real.

(Berger forthcoming)

Is Implicit Bias Real?In any case, many

methodological issues remain.

Statistical analyses used to analyze implicit bias are

quite limited, and it is not clear if findings

demonstrating implicit bias hold when analyzed with

more sophistical methods.

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Some

Outstanding

Questions

What Kind of Attitude?We can ask: What kind of

attitudes are implicit biases? Full-blown beliefs or mere

conceptual associations? Or something else?

Beliefs seem deliberate in some sense, whereas mere

associations are more reflexive.

(see, e.g., Berger

forthcoming)

Are We Responsible?If such biases are mere

(conditioned) associations, then it is

hard to see how we can be responsible for actions

caused by them.

Alternatively, if they are beliefs, then perhaps

people are rightly characterized as biased.

(see, e.g., Levy 2016)

ConclusionsThere are countless other interesting issues, which we cannot review here.

But we’ll leave you with one last question: Might

implicit bias lead to more (seemingly more

problematic) explicit bias?

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Thanks for your

time!

Please feel free to

contact us at:

bergjac2@isu.edu

stoujame@isu.edu