Implicit Bias

An overview I made for my new "Intro to Equity" course

In this second assignment of the first week, I want to look more closely at the issue of bias. Last time I used the terms "explicit" and "implicit" in a passage from a study I quoted, but I didn't stop to define the terms. I'd like to take some time and do that now. Explicit in the sense we're using it in this discussion refers to a conscious choice, while implicit suggests that we may be making choices and acting on unexamined or even unconscious stimuli.

There's a great deal of recent psychological literature supporting the idea of implicit biases, including groundbreaking studies conducted over the last several decades by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (they won a Nobel Prize for some of the applications of their ideas about heuristics and biases to economics). You can find out more about these heuristics and how they work in Kahneman's bestselling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

For our purposes, the point is that these biases are habits of mind that provide us with evolutionary advantages. It is impossible to stop and reason about every stimulus that our brains receive. The cave-person who stopped and thought about the charging lion got eaten, while the person who bolted at the first sign of movement that might be a lion in the grass survived and passed on her genes. This person was often wrong and may have been embarrassed by the many false alarms she responded to -- but the penalties for being wrong were unequal. Being overly cautious was a survivable mistake. The opposite was fatal.

This is a simplified example, but the logic was similar when primitive people were choosing which other people to trust. Family, clan, tribe, village were all social organizations that provided protection and mutual aid to individuals. People benefited from group membership and were often willing to sacrifice for the group. Later, less primitive people continued taking advantage of what had become nearly instinctual preferences for people we know and people who look, speak, or behave like us. It's a bit surprising, when you stop and think about it, that even modern nations often organize themselves in terms of racial, ethnic, language, religious, or economic similarity. People who we don't share these defining characteristics with are "others"; often distrusted, sometimes enemies.

Over time, of course, the fight for survival has changed a bit. Social structures (that is, society) have made it possible, for example, for people who were not just the strongest or fastest to contribute valuable things that made it worthwhile to keep them around, feed them, and protect them. Societies became more diverse, but biological evolution is a very slow process and we haven't completely outgrown those automatic responses to "otherness" that are to some extent part of our hardware.

The point I'm trying to make here is that people who respond instinctively are not necessarily trying to be evil. As the 2015 study I quoted previously mentioned, "When cognitive resources are high, people are more likely to retrieve newer, explicit attitudes. When cognitive resources are low, people are more likely to retrieve initial, implicit attitudes" (Van Berkel et al. 2015). What the psychologists are talking about there is that when we're able to be what we might call our "best selves" (controlled/reflective), we can draw on the things we've learned about how diversity can be a good thing for our society and even ourselves. But when we are stressed, threatened, and have to make split-second decisions (automatic/reactive), we are more likely to draw on more primitive instincts. I'm calling these primitive not because they're not politically correct or woke ways we know we ought to subordinate our own interests to social norms, but because they're actually primitive and instinctual, and often not even good for US.

So rather than demonizing people for responding primitively, we might ask ourselves what we could do to help them be in a place where they can be more controlled and reflective? We might also want to admit that this type of response is human, and we could do it too, under certain circumstances. But that this doesn't mean we can't try to be better. This is similar to the point I think Jay Smooth is making in his short video about the difference between doing something racist and being a racist person.

We also might want to consider whether the ideas of "preference" and "prejudice" are equally problematic. There's a spectrum we live on, in the modern world, between individuality and group membership. Sometimes we value our personal freedoms and other times we trade some of them for the benefits of being part of a family, a clan, a tribe, or a nation. This is a complicated negotiation and it is different for different people.

I want to conclude by suggesting that I'm not sure I agree with some of the suggestions made in other media you're looking at in this unit, that these implicit biases are not something we can't reflect upon and alter. Is this something that, becoming aware of, we can change? Or are we just doomed to fall into these traps again and again?