PART 1 RESEARCH
WHAT IS UNCONSCIOUS BIAS
Unconscious bias, also known as implicit social cognition, implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. These biases, which encompass both favorable and unfavorable assessments, are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control. Residing deep in the subconscious, these biases are different from known biases that individuals may choose to conceal for the purposes of social and/or political correctness. Rather, implicit biases are not accessible through introspection.
The implicit associations we harbor in our subconscious cause us to have feelings and attitudes about other people based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, age, and appearance. These associations develop over the course of a lifetime beginning at a very early age through exposure to direct and indirect messages. In addition to early life experiences, the media and news programming are often-cited origins of implicit associations.
A Few Key Characteristics of Implicit Biases
- Implicit biases are pervasive. Everyone possesses them, even people with avowed commitments to impartiality such as judges.
- Implicit and explicit biases are related but distinct mental constructs. They are not mutually exclusive and may even reinforce each other.
- The implicit associations we hold do not necessarily align with our declared beliefs or even reflect stances we would explicitly endorse.
- We generally tend to hold implicit biases that favor our own ingroup, though research has shown that we can still hold implicit biases against our ingroup.
- Implicit biases are malleable. Our brains are incredibly complex, and the implicit associations that we have formed can be gradually unlearned through a variety of debiasing techniques.
Stereotype
effects that stereotype may cause:
–increase in self-defeating behavior (Aronson and Inzlict 2004)
–increase in self-doubt (Stangor et al. 1998)
–decrease in aspirations to pursue stereotype-related careers (Davies et al. 2005)
–increase in general anxiety (Ben-Zeev et al. 2005)
–increase in blood pressure (Blascovich et al. 2001)
–increase in feelings of dejection (Keller & Dauenheimer 2003)
–increased likelihood of disengaging one’s self-esteem from the stereotyped domain (Steele, Spencer, and Aronson 2002)
–increased likelihood of avoiding the stereotyped domain (Steele, Spencer, and Aronson 2002)
–decreased likelihood of identifying with the stereotyped domain (Steele, Spencer, and Aronson 2002)
(This first part of this list comes from Shapiro and Aronson 2013)
SCHEMA
A schema describes a pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of
information and the relationships among them. In our brain, schemas are templates of
knowledge, or mental shortcuts, that are unconsciously accessed and applied, sometimes
mistakenly. The resulting assignment of schemas, is implicit bias.
For example, when we think of professors, a male with glasses would jump into our
mind. When we talk about mothers, our brain would firstly process a delicate middle-aged
women.
Media & Political bias
There is no such thing as an objective point of view.
No matter how much we may try to ignore it, human communication always takes place in a context, through a medium, and among individuals and groups who are situated historically, politically, economically, and socially. This state of affairs is neither bad nor good. It simply is. Bias is a small word that identifies the collective influences of the entire context of a message.
Politicians are certainly biased and overtly so. They belong to parties and espouse policies and ideologies. And while they may think their individual ideologies are simply common sense, they understand that they speak from political positions.
Journalists, too, speak from political positions but usually not overtly so. The journalistic ethics of objectivity and fairness are strong influences on the profession. But journalistic objectivity is not the pristine objectivity of philosophy. Instead, a journalist attempts to be objective by two methods: 1) fairness to those concerned with the news and 2) a professional process of information gathering that seeks fairness, completeness, and accuracy. As we all know, the ethical heights journalists set for themselves are not always reached. But, all in all, like politics, it is an honorable profession practiced, for the most part, by people trying to do the right thing.
Structural Inequality Behind Bias
We are not born with negative biases toward any particular group of people. The biases we have internalized, both consciously and unconsciously, have been “primed” through our experiences – images and messages we receive every day about who is “normal” or “desirable” and “belongs” and who is “different” or “undesirable” and “not one of us.” These messages are neither neutral nor random. In the United States, “whiteness” is the dominant and privileged identity; socially constructed to justify conquest and slavery and reified in laws and policies, both historic and current, that ensure that white people benefit disproportionately from the benefits of society and are protected from more of its harms. White supremacy is baked into the country’s DNA. As such, what is deemed good and acceptable is normed to white people and we have all, white people and people of color, internalized an “anti-black and brown” bias. The effects of these biases results in both individual and institutional acts and are pervasive across sectors including education, health, employment, and housing. The negative associations and assumptions we make about people of color have been wired into our unconscious mind over hundreds of years and show up in all of our institutions today.
Part of what allows harmful associations and assumptions about people of color to endure is the fact that we have come to accept the structural and institutional inequities we have created as normal. We see neighborhoods with vastly different resources and most days we carry on with our lives accepting that this is just “how it is.” We have come to accept the current inequitable conditions – it’s the water we swim in.
Don’t confuse the fact that “we all have implicit biases” with immunity from responsibility as the benefactors of the current inequitable structural arrangements.
It can come as a relief to white people to find out that people of color have also internalized negative racial biases. It shouldn’t.
Any effort to interrupt implicit bias and its impacts must be accompanied by efforts to dismantle structures that exclude and build structures that provide access to opportunity or create new opportunities.
As we have seen, inequitable structural arrangements produce and reinforce implicit biases. Therefore, any effort to mitigate implicit biases and interrupt their harmful effects must include strategies focused on changing structures.