In 2016, in the wake of racially charged bloodshed in Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, and Dallas, the city of Cleveland hosted the Republican National Convention.
There Iowa Rep. Steve King argued that only whites had made contributions to civilization, while other “sub-groups” did not. Asked to clarify his remarks, King—who keeps a Confederate flag on his desk—did not back down. “The Western civilization and the American civilization are a superior culture,” he said, deliberately associating “Western” and “American” with white. No leader at the convention publicly disavowed King’s assertion.
This is just one example of the polarizing public language that meets the dictionary definition of “racist”—“having or showing the belief that a particular race is superior to another.” King’s argument is an example of explicit, conscious prejudice, when someone outwardly expresses, through words or behavior, a view denigrating a particular group.
But what explains the fact that police departments are more likely to use force against black suspects than white ones, at a time when so many departments are consciously trying to reduce these discrepancies? What could explain why companies explicitly committed to diversity show racial bias in hiring decisions? Why would caring teachers be more likely to punish black students more harshly than white students?
In these cases, and many others, scientific evidence suggests that we’re seeing the effects not of explicit prejudice but of implicit bias—the unconscious, often knee-jerk prejudices that subtly guide our behavior.
Scientific evidence suggests that we’re seeing the effects not of explicit prejudice but of implicit bias—the unconscious, often knee-jerk prejudices that subtly guide our behavior.
The distinction between explicit and implicit bias is important because it changes how we address prejudice in every corner of society, from police departments to schools to homes. If the problem is with racists—individuals like Steve King—then the solution is to identify them and limit their influence. That does need to happen; indeed, after Chief David Brown took over the Dallas police department in 2010, he fired over 70 officers from his force—and excessive-force complaints dropped by 64 percent.
But the new science of implicit bias suggests that the problem is not only with bad apples. Instead, prejudice is a conflict that plays out within each and every one of us.
We’ve seen more and more research into the automatic and measurable associations that people have about others and the subtle and unconscious behaviors that these associations influence. In many daily circumstances, automatic associations are natural and harmless. Not so when a police officer pulls a car over for a broken tail light, and the negative associations he has with the face of the driver can produce deadly results; or when a black defendant’s facial features can make a jury more likely to give him the death penalty.
Last summer, theGreater Good Science Center published a series of articles by researchers and law enforcement officials about how to reduce the negative influences of implicit bias in the criminal justice system. But this research isn’t just for cops and judges—it can help all of us to understand how our brains work and why we are not as different as we might like to think from a police officer who shoots an unarmed suspect.
Indeed, the fact that implicit bias occurs outside of our awareness but affects explicit behaviors—from whether we pull a trigger to how we judge a resume to how we discipline young children—can deeply threaten our self-image. If I have implicit bias, does that mean I’m not really committed to fairness and equality? Am I, at a deep and unconscious level, actually a racist?
The answer is both yes and no. We all carry prejudices within ourselves—and we all have the tools to keep them in check.
When we think of “racists,” our minds conjure up people like the San Francisco police officers who were caught using racially derogatory words in text messages, or perhaps politicians like King. Their pronouncements shock many of us with their old-fashioned racism, in which people’s out-group attitudes are conscious, explicit, and openly endorsed. This type of racism was characteristic of majority group members’ attitudes up until around the 1950s—and today it does indeed appear to be undergoing a vocal revival in public life.
What discussions about implicit bias recognize, however, is that a great deal of contemporary racism comes from people who say they don’t want to be racist.
Evidence of this tendency emerged when negative attitudes or stereotypes became publicly frowned upon in the 1960s and 70s, and many people felt social pressure to not get “caught” saying something that sounded racist—an extrinsic motivation that many have labeled “political correctness.”
This formulation implies that egalitarian behavior is not real or truly felt, but rather, a social grace to mask an unacceptable attitude. As many supporters have said about Donald Trump, he “says what nearly everybody thinks, but is too fearful or polite to say.” This conception makes someone like Trump sound “honest,” but by implication, suggests that those who speak up for egalitarianism are being somehow “dishonest.”
Things become even more complicated when a person (or institution) sincerely values egalitarianism yet engages in some kind of behavior that nonetheless betrays bias. Many studies find evidence of anti-black bias in pain-killer prescription and other kinds of medical treatment. One study found that job applicants with stereotypically African-American names were less likely to be invited to be interviewed. And, despite the avowed commitment of the courts to “justice for all,” the connection between criminal sentencing and race is well documented.
For many people, the very possibility that they too might get caught saying one thing but doing another is extremely threatening and aversive. That threat, in fact, has a name: aversive racism. It refers to the type of racism in which a person’s implicit biases are so out of line with their conscious values that social situations where they experience this conflict