There’s a word for why we’re all probably at least a little bit racist, even if we really don’t want to be: Implicit bias.
It’s a term that describes what’s happening when, despite our best intentions and without our awareness, racial stereotypes and assumptions creep into our minds and affect our actions.
It seeps into just about every aspect of life, including areas like criminal justice that can have deadly consequences. Thirty years of neurology and cognitive psychology studies show that it influences the way we see and treat others, even when we're absolutely determined to be, and believe we are being, fair and objective.
That’s why implicit racial bias has been called “the new diversity paradigm — one that recognizes the role that bias plays in the day-to-day functioning of all human beings.”
Here’s what you need to know about how it works, how it permeates American life from education to health to policing, and why, as Obama suggested, it can be even more insidious than the kinds of racism that are most familiar to us.
The first step in understanding how implicit racial bias works is to understand the general concept of implicit bias, which can shape the way we think about lots of different qualities: age, gender, nationality, even height.
Two of the leading scholars in the field, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald, capture it well in the title of a book they wrote about the concept. It's called Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.
You can think of it generally as "thoughts about people you didn't know you had"
What do these “blind spots” look like, and how do they shape behavior? Well, if you have a stereotype about Asian people that labels them as “foreign,” implicit bias means you might have trouble associating even Asian-American people with speaking fluent English or being American citizens. If you’ve picked up on cultural cues that women are homemakers, it means you might have a harder time connecting women to powerful roles in business despite your conscious belief in gender equality.
The effects aren’t always negative: if you have a positive attitude about your alma mater, implicit bias could mean you feel more at ease around someone who you know also graduated from there than you do around people who went to other schools.
But there are a couple of things that make implicit bias especially fascinating and potentially insidious:
First, since our thoughts often determine our actions, implicit bias can lead to discriminatory behaviors (more on those below). Second, it is impossible to detect without taking a test. In other words, you can’t sit down and do introspection about your biases, and you can’t just decide not to let them affect your attitudes and actions. Implicit bias lives deep in your subconscious, and it is largely separate from the biases you know you have.
Implicit bias comes from the messages, attitudes, and stereotypes we pick up from the world we live in, and research over time and from different countries shows that it tends to line up with general social hierarchies.
Studies have shown that people have implicit biases that favor Germans over Turks (in Germany), Japanese over Koreans (in Japan), men over women (when it comes to career-related stereotypes), youth over elderly, and straight people over gay people.
So it’s no surprise race is a prime area for implicit bias, and if you live in America, you can probably make an educated guess about some of the ways it tends to play out: among other things, there’s a widespread preference for light-skinned over dark-skinned and white over black.
Implicit racial bias tends to work against the same groups that are the victims of the type of overt racism that you hear from white supremacists or the subtler bigotry of people who believe that racial minorities suffer from cultural pathology or who actively defend racial and ethnic stereotypes.
But it can also affect the minds of people who would say — honestly — that they are horrified by these types of attitudes. That’s because the implicit associations we hold often don’t align with our declared beliefs.
The implicit associations we hold often don't align with our declared beliefs
As Cynthia Lee, a professor at the George Washington University School of Law, has explained, “The social science research demonstrates that one does not have to be a racist with a capital R, or one who intentionally discriminates on the basis of race, to harbor implicit racial biases.”
In all areas touched by implicit bias, including race, we tend to hold biases that favor the group that we belong to (what researchers call our “ingroup”). But research has shown that we can also hold implicit biases against our ingroup. So yes, white Americans generally have implicit biases against other races, but racial minorities can hold implicit biases against themselves, too. These results are rarely reflective of conscious attitudes.
To evaluate implicit bias, scientists mostly use tests that measure reaction time and rely on the idea that if we closely associate two concepts in our minds, they’ll be easy for us to sort together. And if we don’t associate them, they’ll be harder, and take more time, to sort together.
The most popular of these tests is the Implicit Association Test, or IAT. Anthony Greenwald and his colleagues invented it in the mid-1990s. An organization called Project Implicit, maintained by Greenwald, Mahzarin Banjai, and Brian Nosek, allows people to take it online. The test is basically a video game that you play on a computer, the object of which is to sort categories of pictures and words.
An image from an implicit-bias test at Project Implicit.
Here’s an example of how it measures implicit racial bias: in the black-white race attitude test, test takers are asked to sort pictures of white and black people’s faces, and positive and negative words, by pressing one of two keys on the keyboard. It turns out that most people are able to do this more quickly when the white faces and positive words are assigned to the same key (black faces and negative words are assigned to the other key), compared with when white faces and negative words are assigned to the same key (and black faces and positive words are assigned to the other key). The difference in the time it takes a user to respond in different situations is the measure of implicit bias. Try a test yourself at Project Implicit.
"[M]y hands were literally frozen when I had to associate black with good"
Here’s how Banaji explained the way taking the IAT feels, in a 2013 interview with the Boston Globe:
“So when I took the test . it was stunning for me to discover that my hands were literally frozen when I had to associate black with good. It’s like I couldn’t find the key on the keyboard, and doing the other version, the white-good, black-bad version was trivial. So the first thought that I had was: ‘Something’s wrong with this test.’ Three seconds later, it sunk in that this test was telling me something so important that it would require a re-evaluation of my mind, not of the test.”
Implicit racial bias can shape our beliefs and assumptions, color the way we treat other people, and even help decide what “feels true” for us when it comes to larger social and political issues.
Banaji explained that in one version of the IAT, researchers took famous Asian Americans such as Connie Chung, Michael Chang, and Kristi Yamaguchi and picked white foreigners such as Hugh Grant, Katarina Witt, and Gerard Depardieu, and asked test takers to connect them to American symbols and foreign symbols. They found it was easier to associate Hugh Grant with American symbols than Connie Chung. “That shows how deeply the category ‘American’ is white” in many people’s minds, she said.
It was easier to associate Hugh Grant with American symbols than Connie Chung
She went on to explain what she said were the connotations of implicit bias when it comes to politics: “The reason I especially like that result is that in the first Obama election and since then, the issue has come up about these ‘birthers,’ and I think what we captured there was a little bit of a birther in all of us. I think this is where conscious attitudes matter. You and I say, ‘I consciously know Barack Obama was born in this country, and I believe this because the evidence is there.’ For some people who we might write off as the lunatic fringe, the association to be American is to be white. I can see for them that feels true.”
Implicit biases are pervasive. Researchers say everyone possesses them, even people like judges, who have avowed commitments to impartiality.
And they don’t just stay tucked away in our unconscious until they’re revealed by a computer game. They determine how we behave. There is increasing evidence that implicit bias — including implicit racial bias, which the IAT measures — predicts behavior in the real world. This behavior, of course, harms the people who are members of groups that are the subjects of negative implicit bias.
For example, research has shown that it can affect health care: in one study, despite self-reporting very little explicit bias, two out of three clinicians were found to harbor implicit bias against blacks and Latinos. And it turns out that this affected the care that black patients got: the stronger the clinicians’ implicit bias against blacks relative to whites, the lower the black patients rated them on all four sub-scales of patient-centered care. It’s also been connected to racial discrimination in hiring, performance evaluations, housing discrimination, and even perceptions of neighborhood crime.
