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

by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

The success of this intervention rests on whether students feel valued and able to trust adults who hold authority roles.

Using eye-tracking devices to monitor their gazes, the researchers found the preschool teachers spent more time looking at the black children, and at the black boys in particular. Before they even enter kindergarten, black children are already considered more likely to misbehave than white children.

The researchers found that students of teachers in the empathy group were half as likely to be suspended during the school year than were students in the other group. The drop was particularly dramatic for black and Latino students and for students who’d been suspended before.

That intervention, grounded in the science of relationship building, suggests that an empathetic look at what drives misbehavior could lead to a better result for both students and teachers.

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.

the color-blind approach has consequences that can actually impede our move toward equality. When people focus on not seeing color, they may also fail to see discrimination.

Encouraging children to remain blind to race dampened their detection of discrimination, which had ripple effects. Color blindness promoted exactly the opposite of what was intended: racial inequality. It left minority children to fend for themselves in an environment where the harms they endured could not be seen.

History, Lippmann said, is the “antiseptic” that can disinfect the stain of stereotypes by allowing us “to realize more and more clearly when our ideas started, where they started, how they came to us, why we accepted them.”

around inside us. Which self dominates—to guide our thoughts, feelings, and actions—is, in part, a function of the situations we find ourselves in. The self that emerges at any given moment is not entirely under our control.

Research shows that people tend to grossly overestimate the extent to which they will speak out against prejudice, particularly when they are not the target of the offense.

Under normal circumstances, for many white parents, the instinct is to show your child that race doesn’t matter by not talking about it. Being color-blind is what it means to be a good parent; it’s a sign of tolerance and a panoply of all the right virtues. But for most black parents, the instinct is to do the opposite: help children to understand how race does matter and show them how to move among people who might be biased. These are the conversations that protect them and prepare them for the world. Indeed, research shows that black parents talk to their children about race much earlier and more often than white parents.

In a now-classic study of discrimination in the U.S. labor market, economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan set out to document the impact of race on the job application process. They constructed fictitious résumés that matched qualifications of actual help-wanted ads listed in newspapers in Chicago and Boston. They signaled the race of applicants on identical résumés by using names that sounded either black or white and sent five thousand of them to thirteen hundred posted jobs. When they tallied the responses, they found that Tyrone, Jamal, Keisha, and Tamika got far fewer calls for interviews than Geoffrey, Brad, Emily, and Jill, even though their credentials and experience were exactly the same. The applicants with black-sounding names were 50 percent less likely to get a callback than applicants with white-sounding names.

highly qualified black applicants were less likely to be called back than less-qualified whites.

Anyone can be influenced by bias, particularly when it comes to intimate decisions like who is going to stay in your home or join your team on the job. When someone seems foreign or unfamiliar or unpredictable, your gut reactions prepare you to be wary. That is when out-group bias can surface instinctively.

In fact, neuroimaging studies show that our brains work harder to process positive information about out-group members than negative information. And we do just the opposite with in-group members.

The students were employing what legendary social scientist Erving Goffman called an “assimilative technique.” You restrict information about the aspects of your identity that are most likely to become a basis for discrimination.

“Diversity” has been a corporate watchword since before they were born. That’s supposed to reflect an enthusiastic embrace of new perspectives and a willingness to hear and accommodate previously marginalized voices. Instead, it seems to have become a numbers game. Companies want to check the boxes but not change their culture. So young people are desperately tailoring themselves to fit in to those boxes.

Bias is activated against women in much the same way as it is against racial minorities—whether they are at the beginning of their careers or at the pinnacle, whether they are seeking a low-wage job or one that is highly paid. Research has shown that résumés from men generate more callbacks than identical résumés from female candidates, leading some women to use gender-neutral names on their résumés, in the same way that the black and Asian students tried to seem less ethnic and less threatening.

For women, being too smart can be a turnoff too. A study by sociologist Natasha Quadlin found that résumés from men with high GPAs generate nearly twice the rate of callbacks as résumés from women with the same grades. And when math is their major, the male-female gap is three to one. Quadlin followed up by surveying hiring managers and concluded that “gendered stereotypes” were to blame.

“Employers value competence and commitment among men applicants, but instead privilege women applicants who are perceived as likable,” Quadlin explained. “This standard helps moderate-achieving women, who are often described as sociable and outgoing, but hurts high...

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.

The promise of bias training is not to magically wipe out prejudice but to make us aware of how our minds work and how knee-jerk choices can be driven by stereotypes that cloud what we see and perceive. Done well, training can make employees more mindful of how they interact with co-workers and customers.

But implicit bias can be layered and complicated. It’s simple to explain, but not so easy to see or to rectify. And the value of training, with all its variables, is often hard to quantify. The vast majority of implicit bias trainings are never rigorously evaluated, in part because measuring their worth is hard.

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.

In a classic study of drinking behavior on college campuses, for example, social psychologists Dale Miller and Deborah Prentice at Princeton University found that the more alcoholic beverages male Princeton students thought others were drinking, the more they drank themselves. Their own behavior was tethered to what they perceived the campus norm to be, even when their perception of the norm was inaccurate.

The second place where bias training can go wrong has to do with what social psychologists call moral credentialing.

If you’ve stored enough credits in the bank of equality, you’re entitled to behave badly.

Two researchers, Margaret Ormiston and Elaine Wong, recently followed up on this idea to find out whether Fortune 500 firms rely on moral credentialing. Indeed, they found that companies that touted “corporate social responsibility” in a specific arena—for example, by improving their safety records—were significantly more likely to behave irresponsibly down the road, maybe by ignoring important safety warnings. It was as though responsible behavior handed them a license to behave recklessly.

Understanding how implicit bias works and what it impacts is a good first step. But the real challenge—for both companies and individuals—is learning how to keep bias in check.

Bias is not something we exhibit and act on all the time. It is conditional, and the battle begins by understanding the conditions under which it is most likely to come alive.

They found that in “too close to call” situations, umpires were more likely to make a call that would end the game—whether that call was a ball or a strike, whether it meant the home team would win or not. Bias was generated by the way the baseball industry structured employee incentives.

Research shows that close attachments between people from different groups can puncture holes in stereotypic beliefs and negative attitudes.

Patients and family members can overlook the “otherness” of a caregiver they depend on because their own needs push back against the pull of bias. And the openness of that relationship can leave a mark that lasts well beyond the moment and extends past that particular person.

Tanisha’s role at this specific juncture of her patients’ lives brings her into the families’ orbit and blurs lines that might naturally divide. “It’s more like a unity-type thing,” she said. “You’d be surprised how many people get attached to people they’ve never known before.” Even ...

Science has shown that intense relationships that cross racial, religious, or ethnic boundaries can quickly undo fundamental associations that have built up slowly over time.

Resetting norms isn’t easy, for a country or a company. But the next step—revamping company practices that allow or sustain bias—is where things really get complicated. That covers everything from recruiting and hiring to who gets invited to play golf with the boss.

It doesn’t just come down to “Am I a bigot, or am I not? Can I or can I not get trained out of this?” Bias is operating on a kind of cosmic level, connecting factors and conditions that we must individually make an effort to comprehend and control. And it deserves a cosmic response, with everyone on board.

He was putting himself on the line every day. And the streets seemed to be taking him one piece at a time.

What they were experiencing on the streets was the fallout of racial disparities that reflect and generate biases that keep the cops and the community divided.