With widespread media attention surrounding the explicit prejudice expressed by President-elect Trump and many of his supporters, clear and overt instances of racism have taken a foremost position in the discussion about racial bias. However, unspoken racial prejudice within people who do not consider themselves “racists,” called implicit bias, is also significant and seemingly more prevalent across the country. According to recent studies like Project Implicit, the vast majority of people who do not consider themselves to be prejudiced, or perhaps even actively oppose racial injustice, are still affected by subconscious racial biases.
Founded by scientists from Harvard University, University of Washington, and University of Virginia, Project Implicit, www.projectimplicit. net, is an online national study that has assessed the underlying biases of more than two million participants. It examines unstated dispositions through an Implicit Association Test (IAT). In the Black-White version of the IAT administered by Project Implicit, participants are flashed an image of a European or African American face, followed by a positive or negative word (i;e happy or angry). The participants then have to identify whether that word is negative or positive.
If participants identify words as “positive” when they are paired with European faces, faster than they do when they are paired with African American faces, they are considered to have an implicit bias in favor of Europeans. This hypothesis is based on the supposition that people who are quicker to associate Europeans with something positive must therefore hold a bias in favor of them. The IAT hypothesizes the same relationship for negative words; if people identify negative words paired with African American faces faster than they do with European faces, they are considered to have an implicit bias against African Americans, as they more readily identified negative connotations with them.
The scores on the IAT range from -1, the highest possible bias in favor of African Americans, to 1, the highest possible bias in favor of Europeans. A score of 0 on the IAT represents no bias, meaning that a participant identified positive and negative words at the same speed when they were paired with faces from each race.
The results of Project Implicit, from a sample-set of more than two million people as of 2012, show that the vast majority of non-blacks in America have an implicit racial bias against African Americans. This overall bias will not come as a surprise to many. However, it is important to note that on average, people from every state, educational level, and political affiliation had some degree of racial bias against African Americans.
For example, although they were notably less biased than people from southern states like Alabama (an average implicit bias of .432), people from California still had an average implicit bias score of .392. Anything above .35 is still considered a “moderate bias” towards whites in the IAT. Every political affiliation had some degree of implicit bias too, even though the average liberal’s racial bias was lower than that of the average conservative. Lastly, contrasting with the traditional belief that educated people are less prejudiced than those who are uneducated, all degrees of education had an average level of bias within a range of .05 points. In fact, participants with a Master’s degree or PHD actually had a higher average level of bias than participants who merely graduated high school. Project Implicit displays how most people possess racial bias, even those who may believe they are unprejudiced.
Many experiments like Project Implicit have observed similar results on a smaller scale. A Stanford University research summary stated that in the Implicit Association Tests they examined, “about 75% of whites and Asians demonstrated an implicit bias in favor of whites compared to blacks.” Similar experiments where doctors took an Implicit Association Test demonstrated that the majority of doctors, despite saying they were impartial to their patients, had implicit racial biases. Moreover, many of these studies revealed that these subconscious predispositions often affect the diagnosis the doctors gave to their patients, the amount of time spent with them, and the amount of painkilling medicine they prescribe. These studies demonstrate that not only is subconscious bias prevalent even in some of America’s most educated professionals, but that these implicit biases do actually affect the actions and decisions we make.
The question then becomes: if racial bias often arises even without one’s intent, where is it coming from?
Recent neurological research provides a potential answer to that question. Various studies from neuroscientists like NYU’s Dan Amodio show that the amygdala, a part of the brain that controls emotional processing, often activates when whites look at people from a racial outgroup (i.e. African Americans or Latinos). This stimulation is important because the amygdala is associated with a type of learning called fear conditioning.
According to neuroscientist Indre Viskontas and author Chris Mooney in their article for Mother Jones, fear conditioning teaches someone to be afraid of things over time, like mice being taught to fear a certain sound if they always receive an electric shock right after it. After repeated instances where something has been said or experienced to be a precursor to harm, the amygdala is conditioned to activate at the sight (or smell, sound, etc.) of that thing, and effectively reminds a person to fear its implications of danger. The activation of the amygdala when whites view African Americans thus illustrates a key issue in implicit prejudice; whites have been conditioned to associate people in racial outgroups with threat. They, seemingly, have been conditioned to regard these minorities as dangerous.
Fear conditioning towards African Americans has likely been caused by a variety of reasons, like the negative portrayals of racial outgroups in the media and the unfavorable stereotypes projected on minorities. Regardless of its cause, fear conditioning can significantly influence one’s actions.
Consider a white police officer who encounters an unarmed African American man, for example. Even if the officer does not actively believe that African Americans or other minorities are more dangerous than whites, he may still subconsciously regard the man as threatening because of his association of blacks with danger. Equally important, if the officer is conditioned to fear African Americans, he may feel threatened by the man regardless of whether he is actually armed or dangerous. As a result of this misguided fear, the officer could then resort to unnecessary means of violent “self defence.”
With their potentially significant consequences within one’s actions, amygdala activation and subconscious fear conditioning play notable roles in racism. It is essential to realize, however, that while amygdala stimulation may occur without one’s intent, one can decide whether they will allow it to affect their actions. Racism, though often implicit, is always preventable.
In their article for Mother Jones, Viskontas and Mooney point to the words of New York University Neuroscientist Dan Amodio as evidence for this statement. During his interview on the podcast Inquiring Minds, Amodio emphasizes how “the human mind is extremely adept at control and regulation, and the fact that we have these biases should really be seen as an opportunity for us to be aware and do something about them.” If one recognizes their subconscious biases in a situation, they can make the conscious decision to amend their prejudices.
Yet, even more importantly, one can actually do more than just counteracting their implicit biases in the moment. Recent research, in fact, suggests that subconscious bias itself can be limited through taking steps to regulate negative associations.
An experiment by University of Wisconsin’s Patricia Devine substantiated this claim. Her experiment began with participants taking the BlackWhite Implicit Association Test, like that conducted in Project Implicit. The participants (with the exception of a control group) were then educated about implicit racism. They were first told about subconscious bias’ effects on their actions to encourage them to realize the severity of its consequences. Participants were then educated about a list of strategies for counteracting their biases. One was individuation: this strategy theoretically decreases one’s inclination towards stereotypic assumptions by encouraging people to meet and learn about individuals in the stereotyped outgroup. Another was counterstereotype imaging: this method encourages one to acknowledge every time they see others that do not follow racial stereotypes, and to imagine abstract (created) and famous people who counteract their race’s stereotypes as well. This method looks to discourage the validity of racial stereotypes, and consequently limit one’s susceptibility towards making racial assumptions.
The subjects of Devine’s experiment took the Implicit Association Test every four weeks for the next twelve, while practicing many strategies like those above. As the experimenters hoped, the participants’ Implicit Association Test scores lowered over time, indicating that they were fundamentally getting less biased against African Americans. The participants were less biased than the control group, too (who were not educated about the counterstereotype strategies), proving that the strategies were, in fact, working. On average, their scores lowered by .2, a significant margin in the IAT which changed their average classification of “moderate” bias to merely a “slight” bias against African Americans. While having a “slight” bias is by no means just, and one should certainly strive to eliminate their bias even more, the experiment still demonstrates the effectiveness of counter-stereotype methods.
Taking conscious steps towards amending our prejudice can have significant effects on our implicit biases. Because of our power to regulate our dispositions, neuroscientist Dan Amodio says, “I don’t really think humans have any good excuses for acting on their automatic biases.” We have the power, and thus the responsibility, to recognize our own subconscious prejudices and work to counteract them. Students can take an online Implicit Association Test with Project Implicit and engage with the strategies encouraged by Devine in her experiment. As Viskontas and Mooney insist in their article for Mother Jones, “we have the ability—and the responsibility—to regulate our own behavior.
