We’re All a Little Biased, Even if We Don’t Know It

The NY Times has a good article that addresses a recent event in the Vice Presidential Debate. When Tim Kaine raised the issue of implicit bias in institutional racism, Mike Pence took serious offense to it as a condemnation of law enforcement officers.

Many people hear “implicit bias” as academic jargon for “racist.” But the reality is more complicated.

The issue of implicit bias is that all of us, law enforcement and non-law enforcement, white and black, absorb notions of racial power structures from the dominant culture and, without awareness, our behavior is affected by it.

To broach implicit bias isn’t to impugn someone’s values; it’s to recognize that our values compete on an unconscious level with all the stereotypes we absorb from the world around us. And even black police officers aren’t immune to internalizing them.

That’s why it’s implicit (non conscious) and not explicit (consciously aware) bias. The concept has been soundly demonstrated in psychological research.

 implicit bias is just one of many psychological processes that shape how we interact with one another. We also tend to be better at remembering the faces of people in our own racial group, or to subconsciously favor people in our group.

This is one reason that when I grade written assignments, I always do it anonymously. I cannot trust that I do not have implicit biases on the basis of age, gender, race, etc. If I might (non-consciously) believe that a particular group might perform worse on an assignment, I need to guard against letting that influence affect the grade I assign a student. That is the benefit of learning about implicit bias: knowing that we are subject to influences outside our awareness and making every effort to guard against them.

Source: We’re All a Little Biased, Even if We Don’t Know It

Jennifer Eberhardt on her research and its implications for police violence against blacks

The NY Times has a good interview with social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt on her research and how it illustrates some underlying principles that might have been at work in the recent cases of excessive police violence directed at African Americans. The take-home message is that only through awareness of our unconscious biases can we hope to overcome the tendency to treat groups differently.

One thing I do is work with police departments. We do workshops where we present these studies and show what implicit bias is, and how it’s different from old-fashioned racism. I don’t think this alone can change behavior. But it can help people become aware of the unconscious ways race operates. If you combine that with other things, there is hope.

Link to the NY Times article: A MacArthur Grant Winner Tries to Unearth Biases to Aid Criminal Justice – NYTimes.com.

Diane Halpern on Hyperpartisanship

One of the authors of the book we are using in Introduction to Psychology this semester is Diane Halpern. She recently won an award from the Association for Psychological Science, and gave a talk on cognitive psychology research on hyperpartisanship. Here’s a link: Link

A cognitive scientist, Halpern called on American citizens to adopt several practices that can ease the ideological divisions that plague the country today. She pointed to 70 years’ worth of research showing that cooperation and interaction are key ways to minimize prejudice and improve intergroup relations.

Memory and eyewitness testimony

In class Thursday, we discussed memory and social judgment, which led to a discussion of eyewitness testimony in court trials. The blog LiveScience covers some issues around reliability of memory, particularly in the context of eyewitness testimony. Have a look at it here.

Last night’s execution of convicted murderer Troy Davis reportedly sent those convinced of Davis’ innocence into hysterics. One of their concerns — that eyewitness testimony in the case had been recanted — also concerns cognitive scientists.

“This is not the first time a person is pretty much convicted based on eyewitness testimony and circumstantial evidence,” said Jason Chan, assistant professor of psychology at Iowa State University, adding that the number of eyewitnesses who later recanted their testimony was “relatively unusual.”