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

by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

A journey is called that because you cannot know what you will . . . do with what you find, or what you find will do to you. —James Baldwin

Many in the community were calling for an end to racial profiling. They wanted fair treatment. They were demanding justice. Many in the police department felt they were delivering that justice every day—sometimes at great sacrifice.

With a heavy heart, I continued with my point: “We are living with such severe racial stratification that even a five-year-old can tell us what’s supposed to happen next. Even with no malice—even with no hatred—the black-crime association made its way into the mind of my five-year-old son, into all of our children, into all of us.”

This book is an examination of implicit bias—what it is, where it comes from, how it affects us, and how we can address it. Implicit bias is not a new way of calling someone a racist. In fact, you don’t have to be a racist at all to be influenced by it. Implicit bias is a kind of distorting lens that’s a product of both the architecture of our brain and the disparities in our society. We all have ideas about race, even the most open-minded among us. Those ideas have the power to bias our perception, our attention, our memory, and our actions—all despite our conscious awareness or deliberate intentions. Our ideas about race are shaped by the stereotypes to which we are exposed on a daily basis. And one of the strongest stereotypes in American society associates blacks with criminality.

In this book, I’ll show you the many surprising places and ways that racial bias affects all sorts of decisions we make during the normal course of our lives—the homes we buy, the people we hire, the way we treat our neighbors. Bias is not limited to one domain of life. It is not limited to one profession, one race, or one country. It is also not limited to one stereotypic association. This book grew from my research on the black-crime association, yet it is not the only association that matters and blacks are not the only group affected. Probing the role of implicit bias in the criminal justice arena can teach us broader lessons about who we are, where we’ve been, and what we can become, regardless of our social group or the groups toward which we may be biased.

For nearly fifty years, scientists have been documenting the fact that people are much better at recognizing faces of their own race than faces of other races—a finding dubbed the “other-race effect.”

It’s a universal phenomenon, and it shows up in different racial groups across the United States and in countries all over the world. It appears early and intensifies over time. By the time babies are three months old, their brains react more strongly to faces of their own race than to faces of people unlike them. That race-selective response only grows stronger as children move into adolescence, which suggests it is driven, in part, by the circumstances of our lives.

We learn what’s important—the faces we see every day—and over time our brain builds a preference for those faces, at the expense of skills needed to recognize others less relevant. That experience-driven evolution of face perception s...

our perceptive powers are shaped by...

Race is not a pure dividing line. Children who are adopted by parents of a different race do not exhibit the classic other-race effect.

Our experiences in the world seep into our brain over time, and without our awareness they conspire to reshape the workings of our mind.

the whole idea of neuroplasticity runs counter to what scientists believed to be true about the brain for centuries.

Slowly, we’re beginning to understand the many ways the brain can be altered by experience.

we have learned that when someone becomes blind, the occipital lobe, typically dedicated to processing visual stimuli, can dedicate itself instead to processing other types of stimuli, including sound and touch.

By tracking the activation of the FFA over multiple displays of strangers’ faces, we found that the FFA was responding more vigorously to faces that were the same race as the study participant. That finding held true for both the black and the white people we scanned. We also found that the more dramatic the FFA response to a specific face, the more likely the study participants were able to recognize that stranger’s face when they were shown the photograph again later, outside the scanner.

the brain tunes itself to our experiences as we move through life.

race can serve as a powerful interpretive lens in that tuning process.

The FFA, with its bright colors on our imaging scans, provided us with a clear picture of how in- and out-group distinctions—set in motion by our relationship to the world around us...

Research and real-life experience have shown that the chance of false alarms—of identifying someone as the culprit who is not—goes way up when the suspect is of a different race from the victim. That’s the practical fallout of the other-race effect.

Categorization—grouping like things together—is not some abhorrent feature of the human brain, a process that some people engage in and others do not. Rather, it is a universal function of the brain that allows us to organize and manage the overload of stimuli that constantly bombard us.

Once we’ve decided on the category, our perceptual reality adjusts to suit the label we’ve settled on.

once faces are categorized as out-group members, they are not processed as deeply or attended to as carefully. We reserve our precious cognitive resources for those who are “like us.”

To form categories is to be human, yet our unique cultures play a role in determining what categories we create in our minds, what we place in them, and how we label them.

We found that study participants who believed that human traits are fixed were wedded to the racial label when they tried to duplicate the face. If they’d been told the person was black, they drew a face that looked “more black” than the face on their computer screen. Likewise, those who had been told that the person on the screen was white drew a face that looked “more white” and was later recognized by other participants as white. Their perceptions moved to line up with the label assigned to the face.

But among the participants who thought of traits as malleable, the opposite occurred. Those who had been told the face was black drew a face that appeared more recognizably white. And if they had been told that the face was white, they drew a face that appeared more recognizably black. These people reacted against the stereotypical image the label suggested.

Our findings show that what we perceive is influenced not only by the labels we are provided but by our own attitudes...

Although we tend to think about seeing as objective and straightforward, how and what we see can be heavi...

The renowned playwright Arthur Miller wrote Focus in 1945. It was his first novel and one of the first books to focus on American anti-Semitism—in the wake of the Nazi regime’s systematic murder of European Jews.

we fill every category we develop with information and imbue it with feelings that guide our actions toward it.

Simply seeing one apple can bring to mind the feelings and thoughts associated with the entire category. In fact, the stronger those associations are, the faster those feelings and thoughts are brought to mind.

The categories we have about social groups work in a similar way. But in this instance, we label the beliefs we have about social groups “stereotypes” and the attitudes we have about them “prejudice.”

Whether bad or good, whether justified or unjustified, our beliefs and attitudes can become so strongly associated with the category that they are automatically triggere...

Psychologists today dub what worried Lippmann “confirmation bias.” People tend to seek out and attend to information that already confirms their beliefs.

Once we develop theories about how things operate, that framework is hard to dislodge.

It may not be the actual world, but we are comfortable there. So comfortable that we ultimately adapt to and embrace stereotypes, rooting them so deeply that they’re passed along unquestioned to each new generation, over decades and centuries.

Without our permission or even awareness, stereotypes come to guide what we see, and in so doing seem to validate themselves. That makes them stronger, more pervasive, and resistant to change.

Just like categorization, the process of stereotyping is universal. We all tend to access and apply stereotypes to help us make sense of other people. However, the content of those stereotypes is culturally generated and culturally specific.

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 value of science is that it allows us to pull back from the isolated case and examine larger forces at work.

the phenomenon of “high visibility,” a theme in Ralph Ellison’s 1950s American classic, Invisible Man. Ellison described the black American predicament as one where black people are visually registered only with the aid of cultural stereotypes that function to distort their image. These stereotypes lead blacks to be the subject of gaze, then block them from being fully seen.

The students didn’t know that the argument was scripted and the behavior staged, and that the person who did the shoving was intentionally either black or white. When the students were asked to rate the behavior of the two on a variety of dimensions, Duncan found striking differences based on race. When the person doing the shoving was black and the victim was white, 75 percent of the participants rated the behavior as “violent.” But when the person doing the shoving was white and the victim was black, only 17 percent of the students considered that same behavior “violent.” In fact, 42 percent of whites who shoved blacks were deemed to be simply “playing around”—but only 6 percent of blacks who shoved whites were categorized in that benign light. Duncan found that the students used a much lower threshold for labeling black actions as violent.

of all stops made for furtive movement, 54 percent were of blacks, in a city that is only 23 percent black.

blacks were much more likely than whites to be frisked, and also more likely to be subjected to physical force. Yet blacks were less likely to have a weapon than whites.

They found that participants were quicker to press “shoot” when there was a gun present than they were to press “don’t shoot” when there was no gun present. Yet they also found a race effect. Participants were even faster to respond “shoot” to a black person holding a gun than they were to a white person holding a gun. They were also more likely to mistakenly “shoot” a black person with no gun.

racial bias was found both in the speed of response and in the decision whether to shoot. Bias was found with both college students and community members. It was found with both white and black study participants.

police officers are faster to shoot blacks with guns than whites with guns, which demonstrates that police officers associate blacks with crime and danger just like everyone else.

To understand police-community relations, we need to consider not only basic facts about how our minds are designed to work, but our history and our culture as well. Every encounter police officers and community members have with each other happens in a larger societal context that shapes how each responds.

Together, we analyzed over twenty-eight thousand police stops that occurred in 2013 and 2014. We found that roughly 60 percent of the stops officers made in Oakland were of black people, although blacks made up only 28 percent of the Oakland population at the time. Blacks were disproportionately stopped even when we controlled for factors like the crime rate and the racial breakdown of residents in the areas where the stops took place. We found that not only were blacks significantly more likely than whites to be stopped but blacks were significantly more likely to be searched, handcuffed, and arrested. In fact, while 65 percent of Oakland police officers had conducted a discretionary search on a black person, only 23 percent had conducted such a search on a white person across the same thirteen-month period. And 72 percent had handcuffed a black person during the course of a stop—even when no arrest was made—whereas only 26 percent of officers had handcuffed a white person who was not arrested.

The same disparities that community leaders view as proof of racial profiling can be cited by police officers as proof of who is most likely to commit crimes.

From a law enforcement perspective, the extreme racial disparities that show up in police stops are aligned with those crime rate stats, validating the focus and scope of their crime-fighting tactics.