[THS] Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain

[Peter Webster]

Scientific American Mind -  May 1, 2008

Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain


Deep within our subconscious, all of us harbor biases that we consciously
abhor. And the worst part is: we act on them

By Siri Carpenter

"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-groups, and 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
Mind, August/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] 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 Mahzarin
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 about Arab-Muslims’ positive 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.”