What Are Implicit Associations?

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 20^th 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.