Buried Prejudice

Siri Carpenter

Scientific American Mind, April/May 2008

There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life,” Jesse Jackson once told an audience, “than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”  

Jackson’s remark illustrates a basic fact of our social existence, one that even a committed black civil-rights leader cannot escape: ideas that we may not endorse—for example, that a black stranger might harm us but a white one probably would not—can nonetheless lodge themselves in our minds and, without our permission or aware­ness, color our perceptions, expectations and judgments.  

Using a variety of sophisticated methods, psy­chologists have established that people unwit­tingly hold an astounding assortment of stereo­typical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin. Although these implicit biases inhabit us all, we vary in the particulars, depending on our own group mem­bership, our conscious desire to avoid bias and the contours of our everyday environments. For instance, about two thirds of whites have an im­plicit preference for whites over blacks, whereas blacks show no average preference for one race over the other.  

Such bias is far more prevalent than the more overt, or explicit, prejudice that we associate with, say, the Ku Klux Klan or the Nazis. That is emphatically not to say that explicit prejudice and discrimination have evaporated nor that they are of lesser importance than implicit bias. Accord­ing to a 2005 federal report, almost 200,000 hate crimes—84 percent of them violent—occur in the U.S. every year.  

The persistence of explicit bias in contempo­rary culture has led some critics to maintain that implicit bias is of secondary concern. But hun­dreds of studies of implicit bias show that its ef­fects can be equally insidious. Most social psy­chologists believe that certain scenarios can au­tomatically activate implicit stereotypes and attitudes, which then can affect our perceptions, judgments and behavior. “The data on that are incontrovertible,” concludes psychologist Russell H. Fazio of Ohio State University.  

Now researchers are probing deeper. They want to know: Where exactly do such biases come from? How much do they influence our outward behavior? And if stereotypes and prejudiced at­titudes are burned into our psyches, can learning more about them help to tell each of us how to override them? 

Sticking Together 

Implicit biases grow out of nor­mal and necessary features of human cognition, such as our tendency to categorize, to form cliques and to ab­sorb social messages and cues. To make sense of the world around us, we put things into groups and remem­ber relations between objects and ac­tions or adjectives: for instance, peo­ple automatically note that cars move fast, cookies taste sweet and mosqui­toes bite. Without such deductions, we would have a lot more trouble navigating our environment and sur­viving in it.  

Such associations often reside outside conscious understanding; thus, to measure them, psychologists rely on indirect tests that do not de­pend on people’s ability or willing­ness to reflect on their feelings and thoughts. Several commonly used methods gauge the speed at which people associate words or pictures representing social groups—young and old, female and male, black and white, fat and thin, Democrat and Republican, and so on—with posi­tive or negative words or with par­ticular stereotypic traits  

Because closely associated con­cepts are essentially linked together in a person’s mind, a person will be faster to respond to a related pair of concepts—say, “hammer and nail”—than to an uncoupled pair, such as “hammer and cotton ball.” The tim­ing of a person’s responses, therefore, can reveal hidden associations such as “black and danger” or “female and frail” that form the basis of implicit prejudice. “One of the questions that people often ask is, ‘Can we get rid of implicit associations?’ ” says psychol­ogist Brian A. Nosek of the Univer­sity of Virginia. “The answer is no, and we wouldn’t want to. If we got rid of them, we would lose a very use­ful tool that we need for our everyday lives.” 

The problem arises when we form associations that contradict our inten­tions, beliefs and values. That is, many people unwittingly associate “female” with “weak,” “Arab” with “terrorist,” or “black” with “crimi­nal,” even though such stereotypes undermine values such as fairness and equality that many of us hold dear. 

Self-interest often shores up im­plicit biases. To bolster our own sta­tus, we are predisposed to ascribe su­perior characteristics to the groups to which we belong, or in-groupsand to exaggerate differences between our own group and outsiders [see “The New Psychology of Leader­ship,” by Stephen D. Reicher, S. Alex­ander Haslam and Michael J. Platow; Scientific American MindAu­gust/September 2007]. 

Even our basic visual perceptions are skewed toward our in-groups. Many studies have shown that peo­ple more readily remember faces of their own race than of other races. In recent years, scientists have begun to probe the neural basis for this phe­nomenon, known as the same-race memory advantage. In a 2001 study neurosurgeon Alexandra J. Golby, now at Harvard Medical School, and her colleagues used functional mag­netic resonance imaging to track people’s brain activity while they viewed a series of white and black faces. The researchers found that in­dividuals exhibited greater activity in a brain area involved in face recog­nition known as the fusiform face area [see “A Face in the Crowd,” by Nina Bublitz, on page 58] when they viewed faces of their own racial group than when they gazed at faces of a different race. The more strong­ly a person showed the same-race memory advantage, the greater this brain difference was. 

This identification with a group occurs astoundingly quickly. In a 2002 study University of Washing­ton psychologist Anthony G. Green­wald and his colleagues asked 156 people to read the names of four members of two hypothetical teams, Purple and Gold, then spend 45 sec­onds memorizing the names of the players on just one team. Next, the participants performed two tasks in which they quickly sorted the names of team members. In one task, they grouped members of one team under the concept “win” and those of the other team under “lose,” and in the other they linked each team with ei­ther “self” or “other.” The research­ers found that the mere 45 seconds that a person spent thinking about a fictional team made them identify with that team (linking it with “self”) and implicitly view its members as “winners.”  

Some implicit biases appear to be rooted in strong emotions. In a 2004 study Ohio State psychologist Wil A. Cunningham and his colleagues measured white people’s brain activ­ity as they viewed a series of white and black faces. The team found that black faces—as compared with white faces—that they flashed for only 30 milliseconds (too quickly for partici­pants to notice them) triggered great­er activity in the amygdala, a brain area associated with vigilance and sometimes fear. The effect was most pronounced among people who dem­onstrated strong implicit racial bias. Provocatively, the same study re­vealed that when faces were shown for half a second—enough time for participants to consciously process them—black faces instead elicited heightened activity in prefrontal brain areas associated with detecting internal conflicts and controlling re­sponses, hinting that individuals were consciously trying to suppress their implicit associations. 

Why might black faces, in par­ticular, provoke vigilance? North­western University psychologist Jen­nifer A. Richeson speculates that American cultural stereotypes link­ing young black men with crime, vio­lence and danger are so robust that our brains may automatically give preferential attention to blacks as a category, just as they do for threaten­ing animals such as snakes. In a re­cent unpublished study Richeson and her colleagues found that white col­lege students’ visual attention was drawn more quickly to photographs of black versus white men, even though the images were flashed so quickly that participants did not con­sciously notice them. This heightened vigilance did not appear, however, when the men in the pictures were looking away from the camera. (Averted eye gaze, a signal of submis­sion in humans and other animals, extinguishes explicit perceptions of threat.)  

Whatever the neural underpin­nings of implicit bias, cultural fac­tors—such as shopworn ethnic jokes, careless catchphrases and play­ground taunts dispensed by peers, parents or the media—often rein­force such prejudice. Subtle sociocul­tural signals may carry particularly insidious power. In a recent unpub­lished study psychologist Luigi Cas­telli of the University of Padova in Italy and his colleagues examined ra­cial attitudes and behavior in 72 white Italian families. They found that young children’s racial prefer­ences were unaffected by their par­ents’ explicit racial attitudes (perhaps because those attitudes were muted). Children whose mothers had more negative implicit attitudes toward blacks, however, tended to choose a white over a black playmate and as­cribed more negative traits to a fic­tional black child than to a white child. Children whose mothers showed less implicit racial bias on an implicit bias test were less likely to exhibit such racial preferences. 

Many of our implicit associations about social groups form before we are old enough to consider them ra­tionally. In an unpublished experi­ment Mahzarub R. Banaji, a psychol­ogist at Harvard University, and Yar­row Dunham, now a psychologist at the University of California, Merced, found that white preschoolers tended to categorize racially ambiguous an­gry faces as black rather than white; they did not do so for happy faces. And a 2006 study by Banaji and Har­vard graduate student Andrew S. Baron shows that full-fledged implic­it racial bias emerges by age six – and never retreats. “These filters through which people see the world are present very early,” Baron concludes.

Dangerous Games 

On February 4, 1999, four New York City police officers knocked on the apartment door of a 23-year-old West African immigrant named Amadou Diallo. They intended to question him because his physical de­scription matched that of a suspected rapist. Moments later Diallo lay dead. The officers, believing that Diallo was reaching for a gun, had fired 41 shots at him, 19 of which struck their target. The item that Diallo had been pulling from his pocket was not a gun but his wallet. The officers were charged with second-degree murder but argued that at the time of the shooting they believed their lives were in danger. Their argument was suc­cessful, and they were acquitted. 

In the Diallo case, the officers’ split-second decision to open fire had massive, and tragic, consequences, and the court proceedings and public outcry that followed the shooting raised a number of troubling ques­tions. To what degree are our deci­sions swayed by implicit social biases? How do those implicit biases interact with our more deliberate choices?  

A growing body of work indicates that implicit attitudes do, in fact, con­taminate our behavior. Reflexive ac­tions and snap judgments may be es­pecially vulnerable to implicit asso­ciations. A number of studies have shown, for instance, that both blacks and whites tend to mistake a harmless object such as a cell phone or hand tool for a gun if a black face accompa­nies the object. This “weapon bias” is especially strong when people have to judge the situation very quickly. 

In a 2002 study of racial attitudes and nonverbal behavior, psychologist John F. Dovidio, now at Yale Univer­sity, and his colleagues measured ex­plicit and implicit racial attitudes among 40 white college students. The researchers then asked the white par­ticipants to chat with one black and one white person while the research­ers videotaped the interaction. Dovi­dio and his colleagues found that in these interracial interactions, the white participants’ explicit attitudes best predicted the kinds of behavior they could easily control, such as the friendliness of their spoken words. Participants’ nonverbal signals, how­ever, such as the amount of eye con­tact they made, depended on their implicit attitudes.  

As a result, Dovidio says, whites and blacks came away from the con­versation with very different impres­sions of how it had gone. Whites typ­ically thought the interactions had gone well, but blacks, attuned to whites’ nonverbal behavior, thought otherwise. Blacks also assumed that the whites were conscious of their nonverbal behavior and blamed white prejudice. “Our society is really characterized by this lack of perspective,” Dovidio says.  “Understanding both implicit and explicit attitudes helps you understand how whites and blacks could look at the same thing and not understand how the other person saw it differently.”  

Implicit biases can infect more de­liberate decisions, too. In a 2007 study Rutgers University psycholo­gists Laurie A. Rudman and Richard D. Ashmore found that white people who exhibited greater implicit bias toward black people also reported a stronger tendency to engage in a vari­ety of discriminatory acts in their ev­eryday lives. These included avoiding or excluding blacks socially, uttering racial slurs and jokes, and insulting, threatening or physically harming black people.  

In a second study reported in the same paper, Rudman and Ashmore set up a laboratory scenario to fur­ther examine the link between im­plicit bias against Jews, Asians and blacks and discriminatory behavior toward each of those groups. They asked research participants to exam­ine a budget proposal ostensibly un­der consideration at their university and to make recommendations for allocating funding to student organizations. Students who exhibited greater implicit bias toward a given minority group tended to suggest budgets that discriminated more against organizations devoted to that group’s interests. 

Implicit bias may sway hiring de­cisions. In a recent unpublished field experiment economist Dan-Olof Rooth of the University of Kalmar in Sweden sent corporate employers identical job applications on behalf of fictional male candidates—under either Arab-Muslim or Swedish names. Next he tracked down the 193 human resources professionals who had evaluated the applications and measured their implicit biases concerning Arab-Muslim men. Rooth discovered that the greater the employer’s bias, the less likely he or she was to call an applicant with a name such as Mohammed or Reza for an interview. Employers’ explicit attitudes toward Muslims did not correspond to their decision to inter­view (or fail to consider) someone with a Muslim name, possibly be­cause many recruiters were reluctant to reveal those attitudes. 

Unconscious racial bias may also infect critical medical decisions. In a 2007 study Banaji and her Harvard colleagues presented 287 internal medicine and emergency care physi­cians with a photograph and brief clinical vignette describing a middle-aged patient—in some cases black and in others white—who came to the hospital complaining of chest pain. Most physicians did not acknowledge racial bias, but on average they showed (on an implicit bias test) a moderate to large implicit antiblack bias. And the greater a physician’s ra­cial bias, the less likely he or she was to give a black patient clot-busting thrombolytic drugs.   

Beating Back Prejudice 

Researchers long believed that be­cause implicit associations develop early in our lives, and because we are often unaware of their influence, they may be virtually impervious to change. But recent work suggests that we can reshape our implicit attitudes and be­liefs—or at least curb their effects on our behavior.  

Seeing targeted groups in more fa­vorable social contexts can help thwart biased attitudes. In laboratory studies, seeing a black face with a church as a background, instead of a dilapidated street corner, considering familiar ex­amples of admired blacks such as ac­tor Denzel Washington and athlete Michael Jordan, and reading Abab-Muslims’ contributions to society all weaken people’s implicit racial and ethnic biases. In real college classrooms, students taking a course on prejudice reduction who had a black professor showed greater reduc­tions in both implicit and explicit prej­udice at the end of the semester than did those who had a white professor. And in a recent unpublished study Nilanjana Dasgupta, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts Am­herst, found that female engineering students who had a male professor held negative implicit attitudes toward math and implicitly viewed math as masculine. Students with a female en­gineering professor did not.  

More than half a century ago the eminent social psychologist Gordon Allport called group labels “nouns that cut slices,” pointing to the power of mere words to shape how we cate­gorize and perceive others. New re­search underscores that words exert equal potency at an implicit level. In a 2003 study Harvard psychologist Ja­son Mitchell, along with Nosek and Banaji, instructed white female col­lege students to sort a series of stereo­typically black female and white male names according to either race or gen­der. The group found that categoriz­ing the names according to their race prompted a prowhite bias, but catego­rizing the same set of names accord­ing to their gender prompted an im­plicit profemale (and hence problack) bias. “These attitudes can form quick­ly, and they can change quickly” if we restructure our environments to crowd out stereotypical associations and replace them with egalitarian ones, Dasgupta concludes.  

In other words, changes in exter­nal stimuli, many of which lie outside our control, can trick our brains into making new associations. But an even more obvious tactic would be to con­front such biases head-on with con­scious effort. And some evidence sug­gests willpower can work. Among the doctors in the thrombolytic drug study who were aware of the study’s purpose, those who showed more im­plicit racial bias were more likely to prescribe thrombolytic treatment to black patients than were those with less bias, suggesting that recognizing the presence of implicit bias helped them offset it.  

In addition, people who report a strong personal motivation to be nonprejudiced tend to harbor less im­plicit bias. And some studies indicate that people who are good at using logic and willpower to control their more primitive urges, such as trained meditators, exhibit less implicit bias. Brain research suggests that the peo­ple who are best at inhibiting implic­it stereotypes are those who are espe­cially skilled at detecting mismatches between their intentions and their actions.  

But wresting control over auto­matic processes is tiring and can backfire. If people leave interracial interactions feeling mentally and emotionally drained, they may sim­ply avoid contact with people of a dif­ferent race or foreign culture. “If you boil it down, the solution sounds kind of easy: just maximize control,” says psychologist B. Keith Payne of the University of North Carolina at Cha­pel Hill. “But how do you do that? As it plays out in the real world, it’s not so easy.”  

Other research suggests that de­veloping simple but concrete plans to supplant stereotypes in particular sit­uations can also short-circuit implicit biases. In an unpublished study Payne and his colleague Brandon D. Stew­art, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland in Austra­lia, found that those who simply re­solved to think of the word “safe” whenever they saw a black face showed dramatic reductions in im­plicit racial bias. “You don’t necessar­ily have to beat people over the head with it,” Payne observes. “You can just have this little plan in your pock­et [think ‘safe’] that you can pull out when you need it. Once you’ve gone to the work of making that specific plan, it becomes automatic.”   

Taking Control 

Despite such data, some psychol­ogists still question the concept of im­plicit bias. In a 2004 article in the journal Psychological Inquiry, psy­chologists Hal R. Arkes of Ohio State and Philip E. Tetlock of the Univer­sity of California, Berkeley, suggest that implicit associations between, for example, black people and nega­tive words may not necessarily reflect implicit hostility toward blacks. They could as easily reflect other negative feelings, such as shame about black people’s historical treatment at the hands of whites. They also argue that any unfavorable associations about black people we do hold may simply echo shared knowledge of stereotypes in the culture. In that sense, Arkes and Tetlock maintain, implicit mea­sures do not signify anything mean­ingful about people’s internal state, nor do they deserve to be labeled “prejudiced” — a term they feel should be reserved for attitudes a person de­liberately endorses.  

Others dispute the significance of such a distinction. “There is no clear boundary between the self and society—and this may be particularly true at the automatic level,” write Rudman and Ashmore in a 2007 ar­ticle in the journal Group Processes & Intergroup Relations. “Growing up in a culture where some people are valued more than others is likely to permeate our private orientations, no matter how discomfiting the fact.”   

If we accept this tenet of the hu­man condition, then we have a choice about how to respond. We can re­spond with sadness or, worse, with apathy. Or we can react with a deter­mination to overcome bias. “The ca­pacity for change is deep and great in us,” Banaji says. “But do we want the change? That’s the question for each of us as individuals—individual sci­entists, and teachers, and judges, and businesspeople, and the communities to which we belong.”