About
Our mission is to provide science-based, accessible education about implicit bias—free of charge for individuals and institutions.
The puzzle
Every society contains many smaller social groups based on characteristics such as age, gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, social class, and more. Today, we have incontrovertible evidence that membership in these groups can affect treatment in crucial life domains like education, employment, and healthcare.
Explicit prejudice in the form of blatant discrimination and stereotypes is on the decline. Most of us, whether individuals or institutions, are well-intentioned, fair-minded, and egalitarian. So how can these inequalities and inequities persist?
The answer: implicit bias.
Experimental psychologists created the concept of implicit bias to explain the continued existence of group-based disparities despite the rapid reduction or absence of explicit bias. Implicit bias is an umbrella term to refer to the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of which we may be unaware but that still create disparities in treatment.
Enter OIB.
Many institutions (for profit, non-profit, and governmental agencies) as well as the public quickly embraced the scientific concept of implicit bias; today, it is used as a path to improvement in every domain that shapes one’s opportunities and outcomes in life.
Outsmarting Implicit Bias (OIB) was founded by Mahzarin Banaji to freely disseminate science-based education to individuals and institutions searching for a way to understand and accurately teach about the science of implicit bias.
Our goals
In addition to keeping OIB materials free of charge, we built OIB with the following goals:
- Effectively present and update the science of implicit bias
- Teach about implicit bias in an accessible (and even fun!) way
- Show how implicit bias is relevant to all of us, regardless of group membership
- Focus on actions we can take, ideally at three levels: individual, institutional, and societal
Our team
Founder
Mahzarin is Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Department of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies how thoughts and feelings that reside outside conscious awareness or conscious control affect judgments of the most important entities in the world to us – other humans.
Mahzarin R. Banaji is Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Previously, Mahzarin was Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Psychology at Yale University. She is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and Herbert Simon Fellow of the Academy of Political and Social Science. She has received recognitions for teaching excellence from both Yale and Harvard. Mahzarin is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, APA’s Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution, and three lifetime achievement awards from the Association for Psychological Science: the William James Fellow Award for “a lifetime of significant intellectual contributions to the basic science of psychology”; the Cattell Fellow Award for “a lifetime of applied psychological research” and the Mentor Award. She is the recipient of five honorary degrees, the Morton Deutsch Award for Social Justice, the Golden Goose Award from the United States Congress, and the Atkinson Prize from the National Academy of Sciences. She is a co-author of Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People and Founder of Outsmarting Implicit Bias.
Media Director
Evan is a media producer and musician whose work has received over 11 million views on YouTube and been featured on NPR, The Guardian, Buzzfeed, HuffPost, MTV, Billboard, New York Magazine, and Cosmopolitan.
Director of Education
Caitlyn received her PhD in Psychology from Cornell University in 2021, where she studied the neurobiology of social behavior. She has previously written for the online magazine The Behavioral Scientist.
Research Assistants:
Nini Sikharulidze
Atlas Sanogo
Justin Yim
Past Contributors:
Sanden Averett
Tim Carroll
Olivia Kang
Kirsten Morehouse
Alex Sanchez