Off The Hook

Introduction

As recent as 2015, implicit bias has dominated our national conversation around racism and discrimination. It’s been said, ​for example​, that implicit bias is what led officer Betty Shelby to shoot Terrance Crutcher, an unarmed Black man, in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2016. When less lethal acts of discrimination occur in schools and in the workplace, often the first solution school and business leaders rely on is implicit bias trainings. ​For example​, after a Starbucks employee called police on two Black men waiting at a table, the CEO shut down 8,000 stores to hold racial bias trainings.

Might there be consequences associated with attributing discrimination to implicit, rather than explicit, bias? Researchers Natalie Daumeyer, Ivuoma Onyeador, Xanni Brown, Jennifer Richeson have discovered this to be the case. Across four studies, they found that the cost of attributing acts of discrimination by doctors and police officers to implict, rather, than explcit bias, is less accountability for discriminatory behavior and beliefs. They find that people show less willingness to support disciplinary action and reform.

Natalie Daumeyer is a doctoral candidate in social psychology at Yale University, where she studies the consequences of attributing bias to implicit versus explicit bias. Ivuoma Onyeador is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Her research broadly explores how people perceive identity-based discrimination and inequality. Xanni Brown is a doctoral candidate in social psychology at Yale University, where she studies intergroup relations, specifically how people come to understand and react to threats to racial hierarchy. Jennifer Richeson is the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at Yale University where she studies a wide array of psychological phenomena related to cultural diversity, including how people experience diversity and respond to inequality.

Methods and Findings

In the first set of studies, participants were asked to read a news article about research that found patterns of discriminatory behavior by doctors toward their patients based on their political attitudes and beliefs. The news article also included information about whether that behavior was due to doctors’ implicit or explicit attitudes. For example, participants read that doctors spent less time with, and acted more aggressively towards, patients who engaged in politicized health behaviors they had biases against, such as gun ownership and recreational marijuana use. After reading those particular documents, participants then reported the degree to which they believed doctors should be held accountable, their concern about the bias, and support for reform and punishment. The researchers found:

• Participants who read that doctors’ actions were due to their implicit bias–that they had no conscious knowledge they were treating patients differently based on their political attitudes and beliefs–held them less accountable for their actions, were less likely to support punishment, and showed less concern about the bias compared to the explicit bias condition.

In the next study, using the same procedure as before but now with discrimnation based on ageism, the researchers upped the ante. They wanted to investigate whether participants hold doctors accountable if they know that their biased views about their older patients led to their premature death. They found:

• Even when doctors’ discrimination led to the premature death of their elderly patients, they were held less accountable if they were said to be unaware of their ageist beliefs.
• Participants in this implicit bias condition also expressed less support for punishing doctors and for reform efforts, and also demonstrated less concern about the bias.

In the final study, the researchers transitioned from medicine to law enforcement. They wanted to explore whether attributing racially unjust police interactions to implicit, rather than explicit, bias led to reductions in perceived police culpability. Given the hypervisibility and sensitivity of the topic, they also wondered whether the degree to which participants’ concern about seeming racially prejudiced might influence their response, and whether or not they would support discipline and reform at the individual or institutional level. The researchers found:

• Participants in the implicit bias condition who read that police officers with greater racial bias acted more aggressively and were more likely to handcuff racially minoritized individuals as compared to white individuals, held officers less accountable.

• Participants who were highly internally motivated to respond to situations without prejudice held officers more accountable, and were more likely to support disciplining individual police officers ​and p​olice departments, and were also more likely to support reform efforts at the department-level.
• Those in the explicit bias condition who were highly internally motivated to respond without prejudice expressed greater support for holding police departments accountable and also expressed more support for reform efforts for individual officers than those in the implicit bias condition.

Conclusions

When people believe discriminatory acts come from implicit bias, rather than explicit bias, they hold the perpetrator less accountable. In discussing the implications of these findings, the researchers are clear that they are ​not​ saying we should move our focus from implicit bias to explicit bias. In fact, they say the opposite.

The researchers believe the rise of implicit bias in the public sphere is important, but conclude that it’s time to have more nuanced conversations about the concept. For example, instead of describing implicit bias as unconscious or uncontrollable–they cite research that shows people do have some ability to detect their implicit biases–we should instead focus our attention on how perceiving discrimination as implicit bias makes people less likely to hold perpetrators accountable for their actions. Further, they emphasize how it is possible for people to override their implicitly held attitudes and beliefs, in addition to developing policies and procedures that push back against the impact of implicit bias on our actions, such as the creation of diversity task forces and the hiring of full-time diversity staff.

The researchers suggest that we now better understand how implicit bias causes harm and reproduces inequality, and it should motivate us to address it both structurally and institutionally. “[T]he more widely-known implicit bias becomes,” the researchers conclude, “the more people (and relevant institutions) can and should be held accountable for its effects.” Once we know better we should do better.

A Prejudice Habit-Breaking Intervention for Reducing Implicit Racial Bias

Introduction

“Implicit bias is like the smog that hangs over a community,” ​Hidden Brain​ podcast host Shankar Vedantam said on an episode about implicit racial bias. “It becomes the air people breathe.” Indeed, like air, implicit racial bias and discrimination is everywhere, and has been linked to poorer health and success outcomes for historically marginalized groups. To mitigate these effects, social scientists have developed and empirically tested interventions to reduce bias. Such efforts have led to the development of bias-reduction strategies such as taking the perspective of out-group members and imagining counter-stereotypes, but too often the results are short-lived. The effects of some bias-reduction interventions only last up to 24 hours, and the participants of these studies are only using the strategies because the experimenters are asking them to. Might there be a way to reduce bias that engages intentional effort in service of long-term change?

Researchers Patricia Devine, Patrick Forscher, Anthony Austin, and William Cox​ ​have proven so. They developed an intervention whose underlying assumption is that implicit bias is like a habit that can be broken through a combination of self-awareness, concern about the harmful effects of bias and intentional use of strategies to reduce them. They found that participants of this intervention had reductions in implicit bias up to eight weeks after the intervention, increased self-awareness of bias and concerns about the impact of bias on others. These results make the researchers hopeful that reducing bias for positive outcomes is possible.

Patricia Devine is the Kenneth and Mamie Clark Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and director of the Prejudice and Intergroup Relations Lab. Her research focuses on prejudice and intergroup relationships. Patrick Forscher is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Co-Regulation (CORE) Lab, a group focused on the study co-regulation in romantic relationships and social thermoregulation. Anthony Austin, MPP, is a Health Research Analyst at Mathematica Policy Research. William Cox is a Research Scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Principle Investigator of the Stereotyping and Bias Research (SABR) Lab, where he studies stereotypes and bias-reduction.

Methods and Findings

The researchers recruited 91 non-Black students to participate in the study and randomly assigned them to either the intervention group or the control group. All participants were assessed on their racial attitudes, sources of motivation to respond without prejudice, awareness of their own bias, and concerns about the effects of discrimination. They were also asked to complete the Race ​Implicit Association Test​ (IAT), which measures peoples implicitly held attitudes and beliefs regarding race. After receiving feedback on their results, the control group was asked to leave, while participants in the intervention group remained and watched a 45-minute interactive slideshow presentation that included an education and training section.

The education section introduced participants to the idea that prejudice was a habit that could be broken, the process of developing implicit bias, and its harmful effects. The training section taught participants strategies to reduce implicit racial bias such as replacing stereotypical responses with non-stereotypical ones and learning about out-group members, asked them to come up with scenarios they might implement such strategies, and were told that implementing such strategies would require practice and effort on their part to break the habit cycle. Following the intervention, participants in both groups had follow up meetings two, four, six, and eight weeks after the experiment.

The researchers found:

●  People who participated in the intervention had lower implicit bias scores than peoplein the control group, which persisted eight weeks after the intervention concluded;

●  While the intervention did not effect participants’ racial attitudes or motivations torespond without prejudice, it did increase participants’ concern about discrimination insociety and awareness of their own biases;

●  Participants self-reported likelihood to use learned strategies was linked to lowerimplicit racial bias scores eight weeks later;

●  Thinking that strategies are effective and identifying opportunities to implement themwas not enough to reduce bias, instead participants needed to also believe they would actually use them.

Conclusions

The prejudice habit-breaking intervention produced the first evidence that a randomized control intervention could produce long-term reductions in implicit bias. The intervention gave people concrete strategies to counteract bias while making them more aware of their biases and increasing their concern for discrimination. These two ingredients are important to clear the implicit bias in the air.

Black women leaders are seen as atypical and less effective—but only when their organization is failing

Introduction

In 2009, the number of Black women leading Fortune 500 companies was one. Today, that number is zero, even as the number of Fortune 500 female CEOs hit an all-time record of thirty-seven this year. How are we to contend with this seeming contradiction? 

Dr. Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, Associate Professor of Management and Organizations at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, and Dr. Robert W. Livingston, Lecturer of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, point to the “double jeopardy” Black women face in the workplace. The authors highlight the intersectionality of racism and sexism as a framework to understand how Black women are perceived at the highest levels of corporate leadership. 

Rosette and Livingston investigate how Black women leaders are perceived, relative to Black men or White women leaders with only one marginalized identity, under varying degrees of organizational performance. They hypothesized that because of the compounding nature of their Black and female identities, Black women will be perceived more negatively than Black men and White women, but only if their organization is not successful. The authors found that, indeed, only in the context of failing organizations, Black women leaders were perceived more negatively than other groups because their two marginalized identities are closely associated with failure rather than success.

Methods and Findings

The researchers asked over two-hundred participants to read a news article about a corporation, its senior executive, and its recent performance. Participants were then asked to rate how effective and typical they thought the executive was typical.

They found that:

• Men were perceived as more effective and typical leaders than women.
• White leaders were perceived as more effective and typical than Black leaders.
• When organizations led by Black women were failing, the Black women leaders were rated more harshly than if the leader was from any other group. 
• Under conditions of organizational success, Black women leaders were perceived just as effective and typical as Black men and White women leaders.

Conclusions

Based on the study findings, Black women executives may have to work extraordinarily harder than both Black men and White women executives to minimize mistakes on the job, given how high the stakes may be for them. The researchers suggest that companies establish measures to ensure that employees with intersectional identities are evaluated fairly, especially during times of organizational failure. This study adds to the growing body of work to better understand the intersectionality of racism and sexism and its consequences.