FEW ideas from social psychology have captured public attention in recent years as much as unconscious bias, the catch-all term for the assumptions we make about other people without being consciously aware of the process.
That reach is partly down to the Implicit Association Test (IAT) created by researchers at Harvard University in the 1990s. Available online, it is widely seen as a quick and easy way to see how implicitly biased you are. The results can be unsettling: you may not think you are racist or sexist or ageist, but, in many cases, your unconscious preferences, measured by instant associations, suggest otherwise.
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Another reason the idea has caught on is that it seems to offer an explanation for why prejudice clearly persists, despite measures of explicit racism showing a steep decline. As the Black Lives Matter movement continues to draw attention to systemic racism in the US and Europe, many have begun to wonder about the extent to which their own biases are part of the problem.
As Pragya Agarwal explains (see “What do unconscious bias tests really reveal about racism?”), recent work has revealed that the IAT isn’t as reliable a measure of individuals’ propensity to be biased in real life as first thought, so the test should be treated with caution. But there is no doubt that implicit bias is a problem.
“All of us harbour biases arising from a combination of what we learn implicitly from society and how our brains work”
Neuroscientists have shown that all of us harbour deeply ingrained biases resulting from a combination of the associations we learn implicitly from the societies we live in and how our brains work. The brain regions associated with fear light up when we see people who we have been conditioned to think of as threatening, for example.
Insights into the neural roots of prejudice suggest ways to overcome the problem. We can work harder to unlearn the associations we pick up, for instance, by spending more time with people from groups we don’t identify with. We can also cultivate awareness. As neuroscientist Lasana Harris argues (see “Lasana Harris interview: How your brain is conditioned for prejudice”), if we educate ourselves to be more aware of our “unconscious” biases – if we teach people where the associations behind them come from and how systemic they are – we can use our conscious minds to control them.
