It seems reasonable to think that, if we believe firmly that people of all racial identities should be treated equally, we won’t perpetuate racial bias. Unfortunately, our consciously held beliefs may not always align with our mental and behavioral patterns. Society, culture, media, and power structures can feed us subtle (and not-so-subtle) racist messages, and these messages, repeated over time, create associations in our minds that instill prejudice without us realizing it—even if we don’t believe these ideas consciously. This is known as “implicit bias.” We can work toward racial equity and justice through active engagement in our communities, and also in ourselves—and when we do, we need to be aware of, and work to shift, our implicit associations.
Studying Implicit Bias
A tool scientists use to study unconscious biases is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), designed to measure the strength of association between concepts in memory. In this computerized test, participants are asked to categorize two sets of stimuli as fast as possible according to the instructions. To probe racial bias, one must assign Black or white faces into positive or negative categories. The idea is that if someone has an implicit bias against Black people (e.g., they associate “Black” with “bad”), they will take longer to press a button to assign Black faces into a positive category. The delay is a result of the brain being slightly slower to process this grouping, because it runs counter to the existing association. Along the same lines, they would be faster to categorize white faces as positive, because this agrees with the existing association in their mind. While there are debates about how much IAT scores correlate with real-world behavior, the test remains a scientifically useful (and commonly employed) tool to probe these kinds of unconscious associations in our minds.
Studies using the IAT in US populations from Harvard’s Project Implicit consistently find evidence for pro-white/anti-Black bias. Perhaps more disturbingly, this is even the case among Black people, although the bias is less prominent than among white people. Notably, these implicit biases are not strongly correlated with people’s explicit reports of their attitudes about race, suggesting the biases operate without awareness.
Unconscious patterns and reductive labels are the fuel for our implicit biases.
Implicit biases can affect our decisions and behavior (although research shows the link between implicit bias and behavior isn’t consistent). In a pair of studies involving an economic trust exercise, participants who had high pro-white bias on IAT scores chose to “invest” less money in a Black partner. Implicit bias also affects healthcare: Providers’ implicit bias has been associated with racial disparities in treatment recommendations, pain management, empathy, and poorer patient-provider communication. Other work shows that in communities where people have stronger racial bias, Black people are killed by police at disproportionately higher rates, suggesting a society-level effect of implicit bias on behavior.
Evidence of racial bias is also reflected in our brains. An important early neuroimaging study scanned the brains of white Americans while they viewed unfamiliar Black vs. white faces. Researchers found not only that activation of the amygdala (a brain region associated with processing highly salient and/or threatening stimuli) was higher for Black faces than for white faces, but the level of participants’ amygdala activation was correlated with their level of implicit bias against Black people. In other words, the more implicit racial bias people had, the more their amygdala responded to Black faces. The level of amygdala response did not correlate with participants’ self-reported (i.e., conscious) racial attitudes, suggesting that the brain activity reflected unconscious processes.
It’s important not to reduce subjective experience into brain activity; what the amygdala activation in such experiments means for a participant’s experience is highly complex and remains in question by researchers. In addition, other brain systems are certainly implicated. Nonetheless, the amygdala remains a marker of interest in how prejudice might be reflected neutrally, and some recent work has replicated the link between amygdala activity and out-group bias.
A Mindful Way Through Bias
What the research appears to suggest is, despite someone holding a conscious belief in racial equality, significant factors—psychological, cultural, and neural—can sway our perception and actions toward inequality. Contemplative practices, research also finds, may hold part of the answer to reducing implicit bias, through changing our deeply held mental patterns.
It is easy to move through our lives and miss the ways we subtly categorize people based on their relationship to us, their appearance, behaviors, and other external factors. These unconscious patterns and reductive labels are the fuel for our implicit biases. Mindfulness practices such as loving-kindness or compassion can help us learn to move beyond these limited, r