Buried Prejudice: The Bigot In Your Brain

WARNING: This article is scholarly as well as lengthy.

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



Scientific American



May 1, 2008
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=buried-prejudice-the-bigot-in-your-brain&sc=WR_20080506

"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 orga-nizations. 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."

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