Implicit Bias

 Research on “implicit bias” suggests that people can act on the basis of prejudice and stereotypes without intending to do so. While psychologists in the field of “implicit social cognition” study consumer products, self-esteem, food, alcohol, political values, and more, the most striking and well-known research has focused on implicit biases toward members of socially stigmatized groups, such as African-Americans, women, and the LGBTQ community. For example, imagine Frank, who explicitly believes that women and men are equally suited for careers outside the home. Despite his explicitly egalitarian belief, Frank might nevertheless behave in any number of biased ways, from distrusting feedback from female co-workers to hiring equally qualified men over women. Part of the reason for Frank’s discriminatory behavior might be an implicit gender bias. Psychological research on implicit bias has grown steadily , raising metaphysical , epistemological , and ethical questions

 

While Allport’s (1954) The Nature of Prejudice remains a touchstone for psychological research on prejudice, the study of implicit social cognition has two distinct and more recent sets of roots. The first stems from the distinction between “controlled” and “automatic” information processing made by cognitive psychologists in the 1970s (e.g., Shiffrin & Schneider 1977). While controlled processing was thought to be voluntary, attention-demanding, and of limited capacity, automatic processing was thought to unfold without attention, to have nearly unlimited capacity, and to be hard to suppress voluntarily (Payne & Gawronski 2010; see also Bargh 1994). In important early work on implicit cognition, Fazio and colleagues showed that attitudes can be understood as activated by either controlled or automatic processes. In Fazio’s (1995) “sequential priming” task, for example, following exposure to social group labels (e.g., “black”, “women”, etc.), subjects’ reaction times (or “response latencies”) to stereotypic words (e.g., “lazy” or “nurturing”) are measured. People respond more quickly to concepts closely linked together in memory, and most subjects in the sequential priming task are quicker to respond to words like “lazy” following exposure to “black” than “white”. Researchers standardly take this pattern to indicate a prejudiced automatic association between semantic concepts. The broader notion embedded in this research was that subjects’ automatic responses were thought to be “uncontaminated” by controlled or strategic responses (Amodio & Devine 2009).

 

While this first stream of research focused on automaticity, a second stream focused on (un)consciousness. Many studies demonstrated that awareness of stereotypes can affect social judgment and behavior in relative independence from subjects’ reported attitudes (Devine 1989; Devine & Monteith 1999; Dovidio & Gaertner 2004; Greenwald & Banaji 1995; Banaji et al. 1993). These studies were influenced by theories of implicit memory (e.g., Jacoby & Dallas 1981; Schacter 1987), leading to Greenwald & Banaji’s original definition of “implicit attitudes” as

 

·         introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects. (1995: 8)

 

·         The guiding idea here, as Dovidio and Gaertner (1986) put it, is that in the modern world prejudice has been “driven underground,” that is, out of conscious awareness. This idea has led to the common view that what makes a bias implicit is that a person is unwilling or unable to report it. Recent findings have challenged this view, however .

 

Implicit Measures

What a person says is not necessarily a good representation of the whole of what she feels and thinks, nor of how she will behave. Arguably, the central advance of research on implicit social cognition is the ability to assess people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior without having to ask them directly, “what do you think/feel about X?” or “what would you do in X situation?”

 

Implicit measures, then, might be thought of as instruments that assess people’s thoughts, feelings, and behavior indirectly, that is, without relying on “self-report.” This is too quick, however. For example, a survey that asks “what do you think of black people” is explicit and direct, in the sense that the subject’s judgment is both explicitly reported and the subject is being directly asked about the topic of interest to the researchers. However, a survey that asks “what do you think about Darnell” (i.e., a person with a stereotypically black name) is explicit and indirect, because the subject’s judgment is explicitly reported but the content of what is being judged (i.e., the subject’s attitudes toward race) is inferred by the researcher. The distinction between direct and indirect measures is also relative rather than absolute. Even in some direct measures, such as personality inventories, subjects may not be completely aware of what is being studied.

 

In the literature, “implicit” is used to refer to at least four distinct things (Gawronski & Brannon 2017): (1) a distinctive psychological construct, such as an “implicit attitude,” which is assessed by a variety of instruments; (2) a family of instruments, called “implicit measures,” that assess people’s thoughts and feelings in a specific way (e.g., in a way that minimizes subjects’ reliance on introspection and their ability to respond strategically); (3) a set of cognitive and affective processes—“implicit processes”—that affect responses on a variety of measures; and (4) a kind of evaluative behavior—e.g., a categorization judgment—elicited by specific circumstances, such as cognitive load.