Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do

by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

In the case of the taxi drivers, developing a deep structural knowledge of their environment forced a striking structural change in their brains. And that change happened not over hundreds of thousands of years but within a few years of an individual’s life. Individual expertise, as it turns out, has its own neurobiological signature.

Whether bad or good, whether justified or unjustified, our beliefs and attitudes can become so strongly associated with the category that they are automatically triggered, affecting our behavior and decision making. So, for example, simply seeing a black person can automatically bring to mind a host of associations that we have picked up from our society: this person is a good athlete, this person doesn’t do well in school, this person is poor, this person dances well, this person lives in a black neighborhood, this person should be feared. The process of making these connections is called bias. It can happen unintentionally. It can happen unconsciously. It can happen effortlessly. And it can happen in a matter of milliseconds. These associations can take hold of us no matter our values, no matter our conscious beliefs, no matter what kind of person we wish to be in the world.

The elements of that simpler model tend to rest on concepts of “us” and “them” and are driven by cultural, political, and economic forces to protect the status quo. Stereotypes help prop up the existing social order by providing us at least with the illusion of “an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world,” Lippmann observed. It may not be the actual world, but we are comfortable there.

They showed study participants ten-second clips of a variety of white characters interacting with the same black character, but with the sound muted and the black characters edited out of the frame. Participants who were unfamiliar with the shows were asked to watch a number of these clips and to rate how much each unseen character was liked and was being treated positively by the white characters on the screen. Sometimes the unseen character was black, and sometimes the unseen character was white. A consistent pattern emerged when the researchers pooled the ratings: participants perceived the unseen black characters in these popular shows to be less liked and treated less positively than the unseen white characters. And the television viewers were affected by this: The more negative the nonverbal actions directed at the unseen black characters, the more antiblack bias the study participants revealed on an implicit association test following the showing. That is, there was evidence for a type of “bias contagion.” The researchers found this to be the case even though the study participants were unable to identify any consistent pattern in treatment of the white and black characters when asked to do so directly.

The animalistic depictions of black anatomy bore no resemblance to any person I’d ever seen. It was frightening to view what the late Stanford historian George Fredrickson had called “the black image in the white mind.” I couldn’t shake the sense that these loathsome images were still a part of our racial iconography, restricting the entry of blacks into the circle of humanity.

Although Darwin’s discoveries revolutionized science, the belief in black inferiority stood firm. Forced to view all races as members of the same species, scientists and public intellectuals could no longer consider blacks a lowly derivative of those white people whom God created first and in his likeness. Instead, whites became the latest, most complex, most intelligent, most evolved humans in this great chain of advancement. Darwin’s radical ideas were quickly accommodated to a racial narrative about blacks that refused to die. And that is precisely what made that monstrous bias so scary to me: it never seemed to die.

I could pick up the tools of neuroscience to demonstrate how humans are not static beings affixed to a predetermined hierarchy. Our brains, our minds, are molded and remolded by our experiences and our environments. We have the power to change our ways of thinking, to scrub away the residue of ancient demons. As social threats rise, cultural norms shift, and group polarization turns extreme, we are being subjected to ever more brazen displays of dehumanization—magnifying our worse impulses. We can’t afford to let them flourish.

one of the most common practices schools foster is the strategy of color blindness. Try not to notice color. Try not to think about color. If you don’t allow yourself to think about race, you can never be biased. That may sound like a fine ideal, but it’s unsupported by science and difficult to accomplish. Our brains, our culture, our instincts, all lead us to use color as a sorting tool. And yet the color-blind message is so esteemed in American society that even our children pick up the idea that noticing skin color is rude. By the age of ten, children tend to refrain from discussing race, even in situations where mentioning race would be useful, like trying to describe the only black person in a group.

The Unite the Right rally was the largest public gathering of white supremacists in a generation. Experts who study hate groups say their ranks are growing as social media makes connecting easier and the guardrails that reined in overt displays of racism have begun to come down. A study of flourishing white supremacist networks on Twitter in 2016 found that two hashtags drew the most retweets: #WhiteGenocide and #DonaldTrump.

Reams of studies have shown that judgments of women in the labor market are more likely to be based on factors that have little to do with professional competence: weight, appearance, hairstyle, style of dress, perceptions of personality. Confidence in a man is arrogance in a woman. A strong-willed man is a leader; an outspoken woman is difficult. Bias determines who gets to shine, who’s allowed to stand out, who is lauded for being a “disrupter,” and who is sidelined for being disruptive.

As a scientist, I don’t arrive on the scene with the answers. I arrive with questions. And my goal is to engage practitioners and encourage them to get involved in the business of putting the puzzle pieces together.

It turns out that diversity itself is not a remedy for, though it may be a route to, eliminating bias. But we have to be willing to go through the growing pains that diversity entails. We’ve learned that diverse groups are more creative and reach better decisions, but they aren’t always the happiest group of people. There are more differences, so there is apt to be more discord. Privilege shifts, roles change, new voices emerge. Success requires us to be willing to tolerate that discomfort as we learn to communicate, get to know one another, and make deeper efforts to shift the underlying cultures that lead to bias and exclusion.