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

by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

As a researcher, of course, I support the gathering of data as a means to isolate and identify problems. But in cases like this—with two diametrically opposed interpretations of what the same numbers mean—data collection alone, without additional levers to access, cannot close the breach.

Everett Hughes, back in the 1940s, called a “master status”: the primary way in which one is seen. It elevates that aspect of the self above all others. Indeed, when “MALE BLACK” is broadcast over the police radio, it is seldom followed by substantial descriptions.

It’s implausible to believe that officers—or anyone else—can be immersed in an environment that repetitively exposes them to the categorical pairing of blacks with crime and not have that affect how they think, feel, or behave.

Decades of research have shown that across a variety of professions people care as much about how they are treated during the course of an interaction as the outcome of that interaction.

At the end of the day, officers want to feel valued for putting their lives on the line, they want to feel as if they have chosen a profession that people respect, and, most important, they want to stay safe.

Yale law professors Tom Tyler and Tracey Meares have worked together to develop a model for training police officers on the principles of procedural justice. But why do officers need to be reminded of these principles? Because one of the primary barriers to good policing is the cynicism that officers develop while working the streets.

Perhaps the most famous demonstration of selective attention was developed by two cognitive psychologists named Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. The demo involves asking people to watch a silent, thirty-second video clip of two teams of people (one in light-colored shirts, the other in dark-colored shirts) passing around a basketball. Unsuspecting viewers are asked to count the exact number of passes made by the team in the light-colored shirts. People are so focused on accurately counting the number of passes that more than half of them completely miss the gorilla in the room: someone in a gorilla suit enters the scene on the right, pauses in the middle for a chest pound, and then exits the scene on the left. Their attention is so focused on the task at hand that their brain records the gorilla as irrelevant. The effect is so strong that those who miss the gorilla are shocked later by the realization that they never saw the giant animal enter the scene.

He realized that the sense of “protecting the community” was strong among even the most hard-nosed cops. But too often they couldn’t tell bad from good, so everyone was treated like a suspect. That, in turn, fueled resentment and eroded residents’ trust in the department. Then, when community members balked at cooperating with the police—eyewitnesses wouldn’t talk, victims wouldn’t ID their assailants—some officers took that to mean “we’re the only ones that actually care,” Armstrong said. “They felt that ‘it’s just us; we’re the only ones trying to figure out who killed these people.’ And that really reinforces that ‘us against them’ mentality.”

when black drivers are pulled over, they are more than twice as likely as white drivers to have been stopped for a high-discretion equipment violation as opposed to a moving violation.

In some jurisdictions, equipment-stop violations amount to a sort of sub-rosa tax on blacks and low-income people, who are pulled over and fined to generate municipal revenue. A federal probe of the Ferguson Police Department released in 2015—after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown led to nationwide protests—concluded that officers were instructed to fill city coffers through informal ticket-writing quotas. That led them to “see some residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African American neighborhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and sources of revenue,” the Department of Justice report stated. While blacks made up 67 percent of Ferguson’s population, they accounted for 85 percent of vehicle stops and 90 percent of citations. And though black drivers were twice as likely to be searched by police, they were 26 percent less likely than whites to be found in possession of contraband. The federal investigation concluded that “this disproportionate burden on African Americans cannot be explained by any difference in the rate at which people of different races violate the law. Rather . . . these disparities occur, at least in part, because of unlawful bias against and stereotypes about African Americans.”

Each year, more than eleven million people are locked up in local jails across the country. Almost three-quarters are being held for nonviolent offenses (like traffic, minor drug, or public-order violations) for which they have been arrested and charged but not convicted. They’re behind bars because they can’t afford to post the bail that’s required for pretrial release.

The pretrial detention rate for blacks is four times greater than that for whites charged with similar offenses.

Being behind bars for months awaiting trial can unravel a life: the accused can be fired from a job, be subject to eviction, incur debt from being unable to pay bills, lose custody of children. Many defendants are so desperate to be free that they bargain for a short sentence or immediate release by pleading guilty to whatever lesser charge the prosecutor presents. That can saddle them with a criminal conviction that has lifelong consequences, limiting where they can live, what jobs they can perform, their ability to vote, and their eligibility for college student loans.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized nation in the world. We account for only 4.4 percent of the world’s population but house 22 percent of the world’s prisoners.

More than 700,000 people are released from American prisons every year. Many leave with little more than a bus ticket and a bit of pocket money—from $5 to $200, depending on the state. Two out of three will be rearrested within a few years of their release.

Most of those arrests are not for new crimes but for breaking the rules of parole that govern newly released inmates. That mandatory supervision subjects them to years of routine surveillance and reimprisonment for mundane offenses, including failure to secure employment, inability to pay court fines and fees, and missing appointments or curfews. Their status alone dictates their standing in society. Parolees can be stopped and searched by police at any time, even absent probable cause or reasonable suspicion.

Although blacks make up just 12 percent of the U.S. population, nearly 40 percent of the nation’s prison inmates are black.

In that 1968 experiment, researchers Bibb Latane and John Darley had participants sit in a room and complete a survey. Some were in the room alone, and some were there with other students who—unbeknownst to the student being studied—were actually part of the research team. In both situations, a steady stream of white smoke was directed into the room through a gap at the bottom of a closed door as the surveys were being filled out. Researchers then tracked how long it would take the participant being studied to get up and leave the room. About three-quarters of the students who were in the room alone assumed the smoke signaled an emergency and left to get out of harm’s way. But the students who were surrounded by others made a different calculation. Those others, who were in on the ruse, had been instructed to ignore the smoke and keep working on their surveys. And 90 percent of those being studied followed their lead and remained, even as smoke filled the room. Only 10 percent responded to the emergency by walking out.

The United States is one of only four industrialized nations in the world—along with Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan—that still executes criminals.

My research has shown that the mere physical features of black defendants can tip the scale toward execution. In cases involving white victims, the more stereotypically black the defendant is perceived to be, the more likely it is that he will receive the death penalty. Just as the blackness of a penal institution can increase support for punitive criminal justice policies, the blackness of an individual defendant can incline a jury to impose the most severe sentence.

Morton contended, as had White, that Europeans, Asians, and Africans were separate species, and Europeans were clearly the superior beings. That characterization was embraced by those in antebellum America who were invested in enslaving kidnapped Africans and in “civilizing” or exterminating Native American tribes. If those groups were not actually human, or at least not as human as whites, there was no need to feel guilty about the atrocities visited on them and no moral threat to an American economy built on the slave labor of black people, who were bought and sold like property for almost 250 years.

That theory took a leap forward, enlisting the authority of religion, when Josiah Nott and George Gliddon popularized the science of racial inferiority in 1854 with their widely read book Types of Mankind. Their essays reframed the biblical story of creation: Adam and Eve were white; the other races were separate, lowly derivatives, placed by God in separate provinces. To make their point, Nott and Gliddon displayed the skulls of whites, Asians, and blacks side by side—highlighting differences that they suggest even an untrained eye could see:

Nott—the owner of nine slaves—believed that slavery was the natural condition of servile blacks and pledged “in common with the Southern people [to] resist all encroachment on our constitutional and natural rights” to slave ownership.

Agassiz also became a tireless champion of polygenism, situating its roots—as did White, Morton, Nott, and Gliddon—in biblical accounts of the creation of life. Agassiz claimed to be an abolitionist but considered black people personally repugnant and had no qualms about campaigning for separation of the races.

Agassiz insisted that he held no personal animus toward black people, no political interest in propping up slavery. But that claim did not stop pro-slavery forces from capitalizing on his stature as a scientist and claiming an alliance.

For much of the nineteenth century, an accumulation of scholarship focused on racial inferiority provided scientific cover for slavery. Before the science, suspicions were tempered by the possibility of change: the notion that the inferior could rise up the ladder. But once scientists decreed that the racial hierarchy was fixed, skin color and all the differences that implied became a permanent dividing line.

Broca’s belief in polygenism could not outlast Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. In On the Origin of Species, Darwin laid out an irrefutable argument for monogenism: different human races are all of one species. Darwin went on to locate the cradle of humanity in Africa (not Europe, as was commonly assumed) and to claim that we are not fixed but an evolving species responding to the demands of our physical environment.

After crude measurements of skull size fell out of favor as a way to certify intellectual inferiority, psychologists brought a new tool to the table—the intelligence quotient test. In the early years of the twentieth century, the IQ test became an instrument that institutionalized bias as it was widely applied to a range of disfavored groups.

By 1910, American scientists had begun administering tests they believed could quantify the mental shortcomings of blacks and natives, relative to whites. Ultimately, that tool was also unleashed on newly arriving immigrants from Europe in the form of a wooden jigsaw puzzle. Those who failed to assemble it quickly and correctly could be labeled “feebleminded.” By 1915, federal law required that any immigrant who failed the test be turned away.

For decades, IQ testing helped to map and tally supposedly inherent differences between ethnic groups—that is until Hitler’s “Final Solution” exposed the ultimate evil of sanctioned racism.

Our brains are constantly being bombarded with stimuli. And just as we categorize to impose order and coherence on that chaos, we use selective attention to tune in to what seems most salient. Science has shown that people don’t attend willy-nilly to things. We choose what to pay attention to based on the ideas that we already have in our heads.

As William James, widely considered the “founder of modern psychology,” famously noted in 1890, Attention creates no idea; an idea must already be there before we can attend to it. Attention only fixes and retains what the ordinary laws of association bring “before the footlights” of consciousness.

In a study I published in 2008 with Phillip Goff and others, we showed people a video of officers surrounding and beating a suspect that our study participants could not clearly see. Some were led to believe the suspect was white, others that he was black. When we exposed the viewers subliminally to ape-relevant words before watching the film, they were more likely to view the brutal police treatment as justified, but only if they believed the suspect was black. Primed subliminally by words like “baboon,” “gorilla,” and “chimpanzee,” they were more likely to believe that the black suspect’s behavior made that kind of police violence necessary, that he deserved the beating he received. That’s how strong the connection can be. Even when we don’t feel or see it, it can operate on us.

The federal government played a direct and deliberate role in creating segregated spaces: refusing to back mortgage loans in racially mixed neighborhoods, subsidizing private development of all-white suburbs, and restricting GI Bill housing benefits so that black military veterans could buy homes only in minority communities.

Discrimination—not income or choice or convenience—dictated where black people could live. As far back as the early twentieth century, zoning regulations in many cities forbade blacks to move into white neighborhoods. Black families who tried to integrate were often met with mob violence. Civil rights groups turned to the courts for remedies, and racial-zoning ordinances were outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1917. But that ruling paved the way for a new segregation tool that was just as potent and harder to fight. Racially restrictive covenants were written agreements that obligated white homeowners to refuse to sell, rent, or transfer property to “any person not of the Caucasian race.” Anyone who dared to violate the covenant could be sued or forced to move.

Federal money helped ensure that segregation flourished in the 1930s and 1940s. Depression-era public housing projects, built with taxpayer funds, were designated either black or white. Private builders could get federally backed loans only if they inserted racial restrictions in their subdivision deeds. The federal agency created to make home ownership accessible refused to approve bank loans to black people, or even to people who lived near black people.

Sociologists Robert Sampson and Stephen Raudenbush have found that the more blacks there are in a neighborhood, the more disorder people see, even when their perceptions don’t correspond to measurable signs like graffiti, boarded-up houses, or garbage in the street. And black people are just as likely as whites to expect signs of disorder in heavily black neighborhoods.

Typically, when you look at another person, an area of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex comes alive as neurons begin firing vigorously. Yet when Harris and Fiske showed pictures of homeless people to study participants inside a neuroimaging scanner, neurons that are typically highly responsive to the sight of others were significantly less active. Instead, the insula and amygdala—areas of the brain associated with disgust—were more active.

His grandfather’s story highlights the potency of ancient stereotypes. The “dirty Jew” rhetoric that powered persecution of Jews since the Middle Ages had begun to penetrate the newspapers, pamphlets, and everyday conversations—every aspect—of twentieth-century German life. The ugly epithet had worked its way into the minds of the average citizen. Mauricio’s grandfather understood that well enough, even as a boy, to marshal all his powers to repel it amid the filth, squalor, and deadly threat of the German concentration camp.

In Notes on the State of Virginia, he referenced the “immoveable veil of black” that would always signal African heritage. This “unfortunate difference of color,” he wrote, “is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”

the renowned African American author Ralph Ellison wearily agreed. Blacks in America are like “flies in the milk,” he wrote. “Negroes suffered discrimination and were penalized not because of their individual infractions of the rules which give order to American society.” Rather, it is our dark skin.

research shows that people quickly and effortlessly associate the color black with immorality. Social psychologists Gary Sherman and Gerald Clore found evidence for this automatic association in a series of studies that involved a standard color-naming task.

In many ways, this is how bias operates. It conditions how we look at the world and the people within it, despite our conscious motivations and desires, and even when such conditioning can put us in harm’s way. Just as drivers are conditioned by how the roads are constructed in their native land, so too are we conditioned by racial narratives that narrow our vision and bias how we see the people around us.

Jean still remembers the rules black girls had to memorize before puberty arrived: If they were by themselves and thought they were being followed, they should duck inside the nearest safe space and not leave until a friend or family member arrived. “They had certain places that were set up for you to go in and call to see if you can get somebody to come and help you,” Jean recalled. Every girl had to know where those safe spaces were.

As historian Richard Rothstein describes in his book The Color of Law, private and government forces conspired to block integration and protect the reigning social order. White neighborhoods had to be protected from “the encroachment of the colored race,” one prominent city planner explained. “Race zoning is essential in the interest of the public peace, order, and security.”

Yet her parents feared traveling the country without their Negro Motorist Green Book, a legendary travel guide that mapped out safe places for black travelers in almost every state, in an era when businesses—hotels, restaurants, taverns, gas stations, auto repair shops—barred their entry. The Green Book promised to provide the information blacks needed to “travel without embarrassment.”

A team of academics, led by social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen, tested the impact of a “values affirmation” intervention. Beginning in seventh grade, students in two groups regularly wrote structured journal entries—one wrote about values important to them, such as relationships with family and friends or musical interests, and the other wrote about “neutral” subjects, such as their morning routines. The researchers found that the African American students who wrote values-oriented entries earned significantly higher grades than those who did not.

The research confirms the connection between psychological states and the process of learning—particularly for black students, who display greater psychological vulnerability to early academic failure.

Before the papers were handed back, the researchers affixed a note purportedly from their teacher that said either “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them” or “I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper.” The students were then given a chance to revise and resubmit their essays. The results showed stark differences in student response. The black students’ motivation increased significantly when the critical feedback was accompanied by the teachers’ assurance that they could meet the higher standards. Four times as many black students from the “wise feedback” group opted to revise and resubmit, as compared with the group that did not get the reassuring comment. And their new drafts were substantially better and earned higher grades than those by the other black students.

The “wise feedback” option led to only a slight rise in the number of white students who revised their essays.