The evidence suggests that apt stimuli elicit implicit biases automatically.
Robert N. McCauley Ph.D.
Source: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons
The Vice President-Elect on Implicit Biases
After all that has transpired since, it may seem like ancient history by now, but one of Vice President-Elect Mike Pence’s comments during the debate between the Vice-Presidential candidates raised an issue of considerable interest to cognitive scientists. Mr. Pence suggested that politicians (presumably, those on the left politically) should stop citing implicit bias among police officers “every time tragedy occurs,” and he criticized Hillary Clinton for asserting that everyone possesses implicit biases.
On the latter point, Mr. Pence appears to have misunderstood the science. Arguably, the most intriguing work in psychology and the cognitive sciences over the past five decades is precisely the vast array of experimental findings supporting the view that implicit cognition and the biases built into it are, in fact, pervasive in members of our species.
Some Implicit Cognition and Accompanying Biases are Nearly Universal
To call cognition “implicit” is to hold that it and the biases that it informs are, among other things, automatic, intuitive, and (mostly) unconscious. Some implicit cognition appears to be very nearly universal. That is certainly true for almost everyone older than six or seven years of age. Implicit cognition concerns both knowing how to do something, such as adjusting your gait when walking across uneven terrain, and knowing that something is the case, such as knowing that your friend is annoyed about something on the basis of some small difference in his or her facial expression or tone of voice or bodily comportment. The biases in this case are the dispositions to attend to these features about a person’s appearance and behavior rather than, say, attending especially to the motions of their ears and the appearance of their elbows. That it seems obvious that the features above are more diagnostic than either ears or elbows is just the point.
These maturationally natural cognitive dispositions concern a wide array of matters that likely loomed large in the survival of our ancestors. Those matters range from such things as humans’ understandings of the basic mechanics of solid objects, their natural languages, and their inclinations to favor their kin, to their discrimination of disgusting materials and their appreciation of the prohibitions on ingesting them. Typically, neither the capacities in question nor the biases that characterize them are taught. Still, even in these cases culture clearly plays a role. Culturally specific inputs tune the relevant cognitive systems, so that children acquire the language that is spoken around them and regard as disgusting those substances that nauseate the members of the culture in which they were reared.
Can People Overcome Their Implicit Biases?
The findings about implicit cognition are that the concomitant biases operate automatically. If, by whatever means, Americans have acquired implicit stereotypes that associate danger with African American males — and a good deal of circumstantial social evidence as well as more systematic experimental evidence in social psychology (link is external) suggests that that is so (regardless of how people performed on measures of racial prejudice), then it would seem that the associated biases could well have influenced the behaviors in question. Consequently, it would seem that Mr. Pence bears the evidential burden with respect to his first complaint about some politicians’ presumptions that implicit bias always figures in the tragic events to which he alludes.
Mr. Pence’s concerns, though, raise a fascinating question. Does conscious reflection and training about implicit biases and their influences mitigate their impact on individuals’ behavior? If people, including police officers, consciously understand the character and effects of implicit biases, does that enable them to overcome their influence?
The evidence in other domains is mixed, at best. Research on the cognitive foundations of both science and religion indicates that implicit biases tend to intrude unconsciously in on-line cognition in ways that can sometimes supersede the influence of years of education — whether scientific or theological, respectively. In the world of science, at least, it seems that the best bulwarks against such intrusions are not just the lengthy process of each individual scientist’s education and apprenticeship, but the scientific community’s collective insistence on and enforcement of the public availability and critical scrutiny of scientific research, in general, and of its methods and evidence, in particular.
Jeff Thomas
Publisher • Opinion Columnist • Licensed General Contractor • Real Estate Appraiser • New Orleans
Jeff Thomas is the publisher of Black Source Media and one of New Orleans’ most direct voices on civic affairs, economic justice, and Louisiana politics. He writes from the intersection of experience and accountability — as a licensed general contractor,a tech company founder and executive with over 30 years experience, and a businessman who has worked across the city’s civic, media, and construction ecosystems for decades.
His Sunday column covers Louisiana legislative politics, insurance discrimination, housing policy, and the forces shaping Black community life in New Orleans and across the state. Thomas writes in the tradition of Black journalists who hold power accountable without apology — building arguments from data, delivering verdicts from evidence, and speaking to Black New Orleans with the directness the moment demands.
He is also the principal of Executive Appraisers Louisiana, an MBE-certified real estate appraisal firm, and EA Inspection Services, LLC, a government inspection services company. Black Source Media is his platform for the civic conversation New Orleans has needed and too rarely had.
Selected Articles by Jeff Thomas
Black Neighborhoods Pay the Highest Insurance Rates in Louisiana. Here’s What They Don’t Want You to Know.
They Didn’t Yell the N-Word. They Went to Law School, Bided Their Time, and Rewrote the Constitution Instead.
Vappie vs. Morrell: Why Does Justice Look Different in New Orleans?
The State Has the Money. New Orleans East Just Needs Them to Use It.
The Failure of Mitch Landrieu
Publisher — Black Source Media
Jeff Thomas
Publisher • Opinion Columnist • Licensed General Contractor • Real Estate Appraiser • New Orleans
Jeff Thomas is the publisher of Black Source Media and one of New Orleans’ most direct voices on civic affairs, economic justice, and Louisiana politics. He writes from the intersection of experience and accountability — as a licensed general contractor,a tech company founder and executive with over 30 years experience, and a businessman who has worked across the city’s civic, media, and construction ecosystems for decades.
His Sunday column covers Louisiana legislative politics, insurance discrimination, housing policy, and the forces shaping Black community life in New Orleans and across the state. Thomas writes in the tradition of Black journalists who hold power accountable without apology — building arguments from data, delivering verdicts from evidence, and speaking to Black New Orleans with the directness the moment demands.
He is also the principal of Executive Appraisers Louisiana, an MBE-certified real estate appraisal firm, and EA Inspection Services, LLC, a government inspection services company. Black Source Media is his platform for the civic conversation New Orleans has needed and too rarely had.
Selected Articles by Jeff Thomas
Black Neighborhoods Pay the Highest Insurance Rates in Louisiana. Here’s What They Don’t Want You to Know.
They Didn’t Yell the N-Word. They Went to Law School, Bided Their Time, and Rewrote the Constitution Instead.
Vappie vs. Morrell: Why Does Justice Look Different in New Orleans?
The State Has the Money. New Orleans East Just Needs Them to Use It.
The Failure of Mitch Landrieu