Unit 2: The science of implicit bias
Introduction
To truly outsmart implicit bias, we need to understand the science behind it. So what is implicit bias? Where does it come from?
The short answer is that we form associations in our minds, associations that we often don’t consciously know exist yet still impact our conscious thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
The goal of this set of modules is to outline the history and science of implicit bias. Having this foundation should help you both appreciate the strength of the current scientific evidence and recognize how implicit bias can enter into decisions uninvited.
With this knowledge, we hope you will be able to understand and apply the principles of outsmarting implicit bias in life and at work.
What Are Implicit Associations?
40 years ago, researchers found that patients with amnesia could form new memories… implicitly. This sparked an ongoing revolution in research on the hidden mind.
Listen to the podcast
Transcript
MAHZARIN BANAJI: I can think of a very young assistant professor sitting down and thinking “what do I want to call this thing? What name should I give it?” And I remember writing to a colleague of mine at 2 o’clock in the morning and saying “I’m thinking of calling this implicit attitudes” and he wrote back: “Use the term, it has an auspicious ring to it” And I did. We published a paper (Tony Greenwald and I) in which we first used the term “implicit bias.”
NARRATOR: You’re listening to Professor Mahzarin Banaji at a talk about implicit bias. She and fellow psychologist Tony Greenwald named it in the early 90s, but to really understand the idea behind it, we have to go back almost 100 years… and talk about memory.
Around the turn of the 20th century, a man named Édouard Claparède published a strange report: he wrote about hiding a needle between his fingers and pricking the woman he shook hands with. The next day, when he tried to shake her hand again, she refused.
Now, her reaction probably makes perfect sense to you—this man sounds deranged!—but Claparède was a neurologist, and the woman (his patient) had a type of amnesia that kept her from forming new memories. She couldn’t tell you who Claparède was, or even what had happened the day before. But there was some hidden part of her mind that remembered what he’d done. That memory wasn’t consciously available, but it was still there, and it was influencing her decisions. In this case: whether or not to trust the man in front of her.
By the 1980s, the data was undeniable.
MAHZARIN BANAJI: People who were amnesiac patients – people who had lost the power to remember things like “what did you eat for breakfast” – even though they had no conscious memory, they did seem to have some lingering sense of what had happened. So something got saved in memory, and they had no clue. That form of memory was called “implicit memory.”
NARRATOR: And as strange as it may sound, we all have them, whether we have amnesia or not. Every time we do something routine like tie our shoes or walk home, every time we do something silly like try to use the car key to unlock the house, we’re relying on implicit memory – it lets us go on autopilot. Now, in the same way that we learn these routines, we learn other associations too:
MAHZARIN BANAJI: Mother and father; bread and butter; salt and pepper; day and night… Sometimes they’re opposites, sometimes they’re just related, but the reason they come so naturally to us is because the two have co-occurred over and over again in our experience.
NARRATOR: These are implicit associations: connections that we’ve made and learned over the course of our lives without even trying. We carry millions of these around in our heads: some good, some bad, some benign; they’re simply the thumbprint that culture and experience have left on our brains.
It feels weird to think about these connections floating around your mind without your knowledge (at least, it does to me) – especially because they might have nothing to do with what we actually believe. Associating “Men” and “career”; “woman” and “home”. “White” with “Good”; “Black” with “Bad”.
We like to think we know our minds. But the data tells that we don’t. Not completely. So what associations have we picked up throughout life, and how might they be biasing us without our knowledge?
These questions left scientists with a tantalizing challenge: was there a way to pull this hidden information out – to actually measure our implicit attitudes?
Spoiler: the answer is yes. And later in this set, we’ll talk about the Implicit Association Test.
Transcript
MAHZARIN BANAJI: I can think of a very young assistant professor sitting down and thinking “what do I want to call this thing? What name should I give it?” And I remember writing to a colleague of mine at 2 o’clock in the morning and saying “I’m thinking of calling this implicit attitudes” and he wrote back: “Use the term, it has an auspicious ring to it” And I did. We published a paper (Tony Greenwald and I) in which we first used the term “implicit bias.”
NARRATOR: You’re listening to Professor Mahzarin Banaji at a talk about implicit bias. She and fellow psychologist Tony Greenwald named it in the early 90s, but to really understand the idea behind it, we have to go back almost 100 years… and talk about memory.
Around the turn of the 20th century, a man named Édouard Claparède published a strange report: he wrote about hiding a needle between his fingers and pricking the woman he shook hands with. The next day, when he tried to shake her hand again, she refused.
Now, her reaction probably makes perfect sense to you—this man sounds deranged!—but Claparède was a neurologist, and the woman (his patient) had a type of amnesia that kept her from forming new memories. She couldn’t tell you who Claparède was, or even what had happened the day before. But there was some hidden part of her mind that remembered what he’d done. That memory wasn’t consciously available, but it was still there, and it was influencing her decisions. In this case: whether or not to trust the man in front of her.
By the 1980s, the data was undeniable.
MAHZARIN BANAJI: People who were amnesiac patients – people who had lost the power to remember things like “what did you eat for breakfast” – even though they had no conscious memory, they did seem to have some lingering sense of what had happened. So something got saved in memory, and they had no clue. That form of memory was called “implicit memory.”
NARRATOR: And as strange as it may sound, we all have them, whether we have amnesia or not. Every time we do something routine like tie our shoes or walk home, every time we do something silly like try to use the car key to unlock the house, we’re relying on implicit memory – it lets us go on autopilot. Now, in the same way that we learn these routines, we learn other associations too:
MAHZARIN BANAJI: Mother and father; bread and butter; salt and pepper; day and night… Sometimes they’re opposites, sometimes they’re just related, but the reason they come so naturally to us is because the two have co-occurred over and over again in our experience.
NARRATOR: These are implicit associations: connections that we’ve made and learned over the course of our lives without even trying. We carry millions of these around in our heads: some good, some bad, some benign; they’re simply the thumbprint that culture and experience have left on our brains.
It feels weird to think about these connections floating around your mind without your knowledge (at least, it does to me) – especially because they might have nothing to do with what we actually believe. Associating “Men” and “career”; “woman” and “home”. “White” with “Good”; “Black” with “Bad”.
We like to think we know our minds. But the data tells that we don’t. Not completely. So what associations have we picked up throughout life, and how might they be biasing us without our knowledge?
These questions left scientists with a tantalizing challenge: was there a way to pull this hidden information out – to actually measure our implicit attitudes?
Spoiler: the answer is yes. And later in this set, we’ll talk about the Implicit Association Test.
Highlights
We make mental associations between concepts and attributes (e.g., fire – hot); this is a form of learning.
Implicit bias refers to beliefs (what we know to be true or not) and attitudes (what we like or don’t like) that exist without our awareness.
Some implicit biases serve us well (like a preference for fresh vegetables), but others can run counter to what we consciously believe (like implicitly associating male with career and female with home).
Our behavior and decisions can be influenced not only by what we explicitly believe and express to ourselves and others, but also by the implicit beliefs and attitudes we hold.
Test your knowledge
Measuring Implicit Bias: The Implicit Association Test (IAT)
Learn the story of a small group of scientists, the test they developed to reveal implicit processes of the mind, and how they shared it with the world.
Listen to the podcast
Transcript
NARRATOR: Our last episode on implicit memory left you with this point: we don’t know our minds. At least, not completely. But in the 1990s, psychologists Mahzarin Banaji, Tony Greenwald, and Brian Nosek put online the test that would shine light on the hidden parts of our minds: The IAT: Implicit Association Test.
The idea behind the test is simple: Certain concepts… just go together.
MAHZARIN BANAJI: Mother and father; bread and butter.
NARRATOR: That means it’s easier for our minds to connect them. And things that are easier… should be faster.
So imagine this: you sit down at a computer and are shown pictures of flowers and insects. All you have to do is sort them. Sometimes you’re sorting flowers with good words…
MAHZARIN BANAJI: Words like sunshine and love and peace and joy and things like that…
NARRATOR: …and insects with bad words…
MAHZARIN BANAJI: …devil, bomb, war, vomit…
NARRATOR: Sometimes, you have to do the opposite: sort flowers with vomit and bugs with joy.
One version is a lot easier than the other. We all know which one. Flowers with good, insects with bad… these pairings are faster. Maybe just by a few milliseconds, maybe by a few hundred – just how much faster tells you how strong these implicit associations are.
That’s it. They had realized that one way to measure the mind was to measure time. And once they had the test, the questions were endless. Are you more likely to associate good with the Red Sox or the Yankees? With “Young” or “Old”? With “Black” or “White”?
MAHZARIN BANAJI: The first test I ever took was the race test. For half the trials, the light-skinned faces and good words were associated while dark skinned faces and bad words were associated. And I did that one first, and I did that one flawlessly. And I knew that the opposite pairing would be equally easy for me: white and bad, black and good – why should that be any different than the one before?
So I was quite stunned when my fingers almost couldn’t find their way on the keyboard. When I couldn’t keep in mind which had to go where. I made many more mistakes. I took one and a half times as long to do it. By the end of this three-minute experience, I was in a sweat. And my first thought was “something is screwed up with this test, because it can’t be me. I know my mind.”
NARRATOR: But it wasn’t the test.
ALAN ALDA: You’re taking this for the umpteenth time… and you still haven’t caught onto the fact that you’re a little biased? [laughter]
NARRATOR: They shared it with friends and family, students in their labs, fellow scientists at conferences. The results were clear.
ANDERSON COOPER: So when people say ‘well, I’m colorblind, I don’t see color,’ this test shows otherwise?
ANTHONY GREENWALD: Quite a bit otherwise.
NARRATOR: Somehow, the IAT could tap into implicit associations people didn’t even know they had.
JOAN: I… [laughter]
SARAH JAMES: You’re flabbergasted.
JOAN: I’m flabbergasted.
NARRATOR: Mahzarin, Tony, and Brian began joking:
MAHZARIN BANAJI: These effects are so big, you could even pick it up on the Internet.
NARRATOR: And then they put it online — and it went viral.
Since 1998, millions of tests have been taken around the world – and this data is powerful.
The responses tell us that our implicit attitudes… can change. Over the past 20 years, they have changed – at least some of them. This change isn’t something that happens over the course of a single podcast or seminar, but this tells us that with time and practice, we can reshape our minds. And that’s something worth working towards.
Transcript
NARRATOR: Our last episode on implicit memory left you with this point: we don’t know our minds. At least, not completely. But in the 1990s, psychologists Mahzarin Banaji, Tony Greenwald, and Brian Nosek put online the test that would shine light on the hidden parts of our minds: The IAT: Implicit Association Test.
The idea behind the test is simple: Certain concepts… just go together.
MAHZARIN BANAJI: Mother and father; bread and butter.
NARRATOR: That means it’s easier for our minds to connect them. And things that are easier… should be faster.
So imagine this: you sit down at a computer and are shown pictures of flowers and insects. All you have to do is sort them. Sometimes you’re sorting flowers with good words…
MAHZARIN BANAJI: Words like sunshine and love and peace and joy and things like that…
NARRATOR: …and insects with bad words…
MAHZARIN BANAJI: …devil, bomb, war, vomit…
NARRATOR: Sometimes, you have to do the opposite: sort flowers with vomit and bugs with joy.
One version is a lot easier than the other. We all know which one. Flowers with good, insects with bad… these pairings are faster. Maybe just by a few milliseconds, maybe by a few hundred – just how much faster tells you how strong these implicit associations are.
That’s it. They had realized that one way to measure the mind was to measure time. And once they had the test, the questions were endless. Are you more likely to associate good with the Red Sox or the Yankees? With “Young” or “Old”? With “Black” or “White”?
MAHZARIN BANAJI: The first test I ever took was the race test. For half the trials, the light-skinned faces and good words were associated while dark skinned faces and bad words were associated. And I did that one first, and I did that one flawlessly. And I knew that the opposite pairing would be equally easy for me: white and bad, black and good – why should that be any different than the one before?
So I was quite stunned when my fingers almost couldn’t find their way on the keyboard. When I couldn’t keep in mind which had to go where. I made many more mistakes. I took one and a half times as long to do it. By the end of this three-minute experience, I was in a sweat. And my first thought was “something is screwed up with this test, because it can’t be me. I know my mind.”
NARRATOR: But it wasn’t the test.
ALAN ALDA: You’re taking this for the umpteenth time… and you still haven’t caught onto the fact that you’re a little biased? [laughter]
NARRATOR: They shared it with friends and family, students in their labs, fellow scientists at conferences. The results were clear.
ANDERSON COOPER: So when people say ‘well, I’m colorblind, I don’t see color,’ this test shows otherwise?
ANTHONY GREENWALD: Quite a bit otherwise.
NARRATOR: Somehow, the IAT could tap into implicit associations people didn’t even know they had.
JOAN: I… [laughter]
SARAH JAMES: You’re flabbergasted.
JOAN: I’m flabbergasted.
NARRATOR: Mahzarin, Tony, and Brian began joking:
MAHZARIN BANAJI: These effects are so big, you could even pick it up on the Internet.
NARRATOR: And then they put it online — and it went viral.
Since 1998, millions of tests have been taken around the world – and this data is powerful.
The responses tell us that our implicit attitudes… can change. Over the past 20 years, they have changed – at least some of them. This change isn’t something that happens over the course of a single podcast or seminar, but this tells us that with time and practice, we can reshape our minds. And that’s something worth working towards.
Highlights
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures the strength of association between concepts like insect or flower and attributes like good or bad.
How fast and accurately we respond to the pairing of a concept and attribute, or our reaction time, is the basic IAT measure.
The faster we can sort concept and attribute together (like flower and good), the stronger our mental association between them.
Culture and experience shape what we learn and associate together to become the basis of implicit bias.
Because implicit bias has been learned, it can be unlearned — but that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to do!
Test your knowledge
What You've Learned
As we move through our lives, we have experiences that create new mental associations and shape the ones we already have. These implicit associations can impact our behavior without us consciously knowing it.
Now, these associations aren’t always bad! They can create a bias favoring our own group that may even be beneficial. Just think about how our love of our family, a favorite sports team, and even where we work positively shapes our behavior – we are kind, caring, and loyal to our group.
It’s when implicit bias gets in the way of us making the best choices for ourselves and our organizations that we need to pay attention. Does implicit bias lead us to favor a member of our own group to our disadvantage, or lead us to act in ways counter to our own values of fairness and equality? A manager shouldn’t select a family member for a job over a better candidate who is not a family member. A doctor shouldn’t deny a working-class patient an appropriate medical treatment that they would offer to a wealthy patient. These are the errors in our decisions that we can only correct if they are revealed.
The first step in making our actions align with our beliefs is to know what our implicit biases are. Of course, taking an IAT will not by itself alter or “fix” our bias any more than taking a cholesterol test will cure us of heart disease. The best use of the IAT is to use it to learn more about the contents of our minds of which we are unaware. Once we do this, we are ready to shape our behavior in the direction we choose.
We can get the most reliable data about ourselves by taking an IAT multiple times. Think about it this way – if you wanted to know how good a batter was, you wouldn’t toss them a single ball once and then decide if they’re the next Babe Ruth or not! To get an accurate measure of your implicit bias, take the same test a few different times and consider the average of your scores to be the best indicator of your score.
The important takeaway is this: Only if we know our implicit biases can we actively work to outsmart them.
Reflections
Question 1
Taking an Implicit Association Test and reflecting on it can be a pivotal moment. It certainly was for the co-developers of the IAT. At first, we were puzzled about how the test could show us to be biased when we “felt” no bias at all. But thinking about the IAT and asking deeper questions about what our test result meant allowed us to recognize where bias comes from and how it gets inside us; this knowledge has given us a more accurate and even more humble view of ourselves.
If you have taken one or more IATs, please write about the experience of taking them in the box below. Here are some questions to help guide your reflection:
- Which tests did you take?
- How did you think you might perform on the test before you took it?
- How did you feel or what did you sense as you were taking the test? Were some associations easier to make than others?
- Were you surprised by your test result?
- What do you think the test result means? Think about your own biology and temperament, your upbringing and culture, and your current station in life. How might these have shaped you?
- Do you feel your test results align with the values you hold?
What you write in this box is just for you. You will have a chance to download your response, but it will not be stored on our servers.
Your response:
Our thoughts:
Some people “feel” the conflict between their stated values of fairness and the implicit bias the test reveals. Others do not experience any conflict and are surprised by their IAT result.
But we all want our values to dictate how we behave. The IAT experience is often memorable because it can challenge your sense of yourself.
If you show no bias on a particular test, take another! We hope that your IAT experience can be a catalyst for your own thinking and growth.
Congratulations! You have completed Unit 2: The science of implicit bias .
Dive deeper
“[W]here did this idea of implicit bias come from? How can we measure biases that people don’t know they have, or at least are unwilling to endorse openly?” Hear the conversation between psychologists Andy Lutrell and Mahzarin Banaji at Opinion Science.
“Is there a part of ourselves that we don’t acknowledge, that we don’t even have access to and that might make us ashamed if we encounter it?” NPR’s Invisibilia discusses the implicit revolution further in their episode “The Culture Inside”.
Explore the lab websites of Professors Anthony G. Greenwald and Brian Nosek to learn more about their research on the implicit processes of the mind.
“We provide the first report of long-term change in both implicit and explicit attitudes — measured from the same individual — towards multiple social groups,” Charlesworth said … “implicit attitudes appear, in fact, to be capable of long-term durable change.” From Stephen Johnson’s Big Think article “Americans have become less biased — explicitly and implicitly — since 2004“
Next unit:
