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

by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

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.

This stereotypic association is so powerful that the mere presence of a black face, even one that appears so fleetingly we are unaware of it, can cause us to see weapons more quickly—or to imagine weapons that are not there. The mere thought of violent crime can lead us to shift our eyes away from a white face and toward a black face. And although looking black is not a crime, jurors are more likely to deliver a death sentence to black felons who have stereotypically black facial features than to those who do not, at least when their victims are white.

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.

That cringe-worthy expression “They all look alike” has long been considered the province of the bigot. But it is actually a function of biology and exposure. Our brains are better at processing faces that evoke a sense of familiarity.

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.

I found this all remarkable because it seemed to show not only how powerful our experiences must be to fundamentally change our brain but also how swiftly the transformation can take place.

The challenges of cross-racial identification are as well known to law enforcement officials as they are to scientists. 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. It’s a system that brings coherence to a chaotic world; it helps our brains make judgments more quickly and efficiently by instinctively relying on patterns that seem predictable. But categorization also can impede our efforts to embrace and understand people who are deemed not like us, by tuning us to the faces of people who look like us and dampening our sensitivity to those who don’t.

The novel shows the power of the gaze of others to define how you’re seen in the world; it can shape the scope of your life and influence how you see yourself. But the story also illustrates the redemptive power of personal connections to break through the bias

that categorization seeds.

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.

His work led him to worry that Americans might make rash and illogical civic and political choices if stereotypes blinded them to information that didn’t conform to what they already believed. And that is exactly what is happening now. Psychologists today dub what worried Lippmann “confirmation bias.” People tend to seek out and attend to information that already confirms their beliefs. We find such information more trustworthy and are less critical of it, even when we are presented with credible, seemingly unassailable facts that suggest otherwise. Once we develop theories about how things operate, that framework is hard to dislodge.

Lippmann was not concerned with the idea of stereotypes as a precursor to prejudice nor as a rationalization for it. In fact, the attitudes he expressed toward racial and ethnic intolerance would brand him a bigot today.

In the United States, blacks are so strongly associated with threat and aggression that this stereotypic association can even impact our ability to accurately read the facial expressions of black people. For example, a black man who is excited might appear angry. Fear can be misread as outrage. Silence taken as belligerence.

The power of adults to shape that lens is heavily vested in parents. Unsurprisingly, studies confirm that biased parents tend to produce children who are biased as well.

People typically assume that having black characters play more powerful, positive roles on television and in the movies will curb bias. Yet researchers have found that even in popular television shows that feature black characters playing such roles, white actors tend to react more negatively to black actors than to other white actors on-screen. This bias is exhibited through subtle, nonverbal actions—a squint, a slight grimace, a small shift of the body—yet it still has impact. It leads those viewers who tune in to those shows to exhibit more bias themselves.

The researchers—Max Weisbuch, Kristin Pauker, and Nalini Ambady—chose eleven popular television shows that have positive representations of black characters—shows like CSI and Grey’s Anatomy, where black characters are doctors, police officers, and scientists. 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. While this study was going on, more than nine million viewers tuned in to each of these shows across the United States every week. Altogether, the shows were viewed more than five billion times in a single year. It’s easy to get absorbed in a story line and invest in characters. But even as we come to connect with the characters and their lives,...

Bias, even when we are not conscious of it, has consequences that we need to understand and mitigate. The stereotypic associations we carry in our heads can affect what we perceive, how we think, and the actions we take.

White participants rated black men as more capable of doing harm than white men of the same physical stature and size. Black participants exhibited no such bias. They then showed nonblack study participants a series of faces and asked them to imagine that the person depicted had “behaved aggressively toward a police officer but was not wielding a weapon.” Study participants thought that the police officer would be justified in using more force to subdue the black men in this situation compared with the white men.

If people perceive black bodies as more threatening than white bodies, might they perceive black body movements as more threatening than the identical movements made by whites? Research suggests that they do.

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.

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.

I posed the question to conference participants from Poland, Portugal, Italy, Spain, Belgium, England, and Australia. They all knew the answer. With different accents, every single person at the table said the black-ape association was alive and well in their country too. There seemed to me to be no place in the world that was not polluted with the narrative of black inferiority.

Marginalized groups in countries all over the world are often discredited through animal imagery. Disfavored immigrant groups—Mexicans in the United States, Jews in Germany, the Roma in Italy, Muslims across the European continent—are frequently likened to insects, rodents, and other vermin known to invade spaces, spread disease, or breed rapidly. That has been a universal fixture of history.

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.

The patterns of residential racial segregation that we live with today are a legacy of our nation’s not-so-distant past, when public institutions and private social forces conspired to keep white neighborhoods white by restricting where black people could live.

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.

Fifty years ago, it was common for lenders to summarily draw red lines on a map around black areas and

refuse to loan money to people who wanted to buy homes there because financial investment was considered too risky, the substandard neighborhoods too unlikely to hold their value. That sort of redlining shaped both perception and reality.

But skin color is really just a marker for where on earth our ancestors have lived. Across tens of thousands of years, as humans have migrated around the globe, skin color changed to meet the demands of the new environments that became their homes. As harmful ultraviolet radiation emitted by the sun beat down on early humans, the melanin pigment that our bodies produce came to the rescue. Melanin provides protection. And the more melanin our bodies produced, the darker our skin appeared. Melanin is produced by a variety of species—from frogs to dates—and like humans their color darkens in accordance with the environment of their habitat. “Skin color,” anthropologist Nina Jablonski explains, “is one of the most obvious patterns of human biological variation.” And melanin is highly responsive to the physical space we find ourselves in.

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.” Real estate agents were warned against selling to “certain racial types”—specifically blacks and foreigners—because their mere presence would “diminish the value” of every home in the neighborhood. The gleaming suburban subdivisions that sprang up after World War II were eminently affordable, but off-limits to blacks.

Bias both propelled and shadowed the movements of twentieth-century migrants in ways that were simple to define and easy to see. Today, in the twenty-first century, bias has found a new accessory in technology that magnifies what we see but leaves us ill equipped to decipher its meaning. Surveillance cameras have gone mainstream, guarding our front doors. Online social networks connect us to our neighbors. But the same tools that promise security and promote camaraderie can foster a sort of tunnel vision that distorts our sense of danger, heightens suspicion, and even puts the safety of others at risk. Residents can circulate photographs of “suspicious” strangers to neighbors and police with the touch of a button and without any evidence the person is doing anything wrong—a practice that can amplify and justify bias in the minds of locals primed by worries about the safety of their homes.

And while we expect technology to make us less fearful, it also encourages us to act more quickly on the fears—acknowledged or not—that we harbor. Sometimes its mere existence seems to prime us to confront the bogeyman we think we need protection from.

Research supports the notion that raising the issue of race and discrimination explicitly can lead people to be more open-minded and act more fairly, particularly when they have time to reflect on their choices.

Conversations about racial issues in interracial spaces can be uncomfortable. It’s no wonder people tend to avoid them. Integration is hard work, and threat looms over the process. White people don’t want to have to worry that something they say will come out wrong and they’ll be accused of being racist. And minorities, on the other side of the divide, don’t want to have to wonder if they’re going to be insulted by some tone-deaf remark. The interaction required to move past stereotypes takes energy, commitment, and a willingness to let big uncomfortable issues intrude on intimate spaces—your home and your neighborhood.

Both black and Latino students do better academically when they attend integrated schools, and white students’ academic performance doesn’t suffer when their classmates are black and brown. Socioeconomics plays a key role in that outcome: Integrated schools in middle-class and affluent areas tend to be better resourced. They are more likely to have experienced teachers, well-educated parents, and high academic expectations than segregated schools in low-income communities. Tracking test scores, graduation rates, and college success can help us validate the impact of that.

Back then, racial bias was commonly viewed as the product of ignorance. So, the thinking went, simply bringing people into contact with one another would soften hostile racial attitudes, by allowing everyone to replace broad stereotypes with individual names, faces, and facts. Once the barriers of bias were relaxed, social integration would allow minorities to rise. Some of that optimism surrounding equal access to education has indeed been borne out. Black students who attended integrated schools for at least five years earn 25 percent more as adults and are in far better health by middle age than their counterparts from segregated schools. And the benefits extend past racial lines and over generations. People of all races who attended racially diverse schools are more likely to have friends of other races, choose to live and raise their children in integrated neighborhoods, and have higher levels of civic engagement than those who did not. But the promise of school integration as an antidote to prejudice ran into hurdles that advocates didn’t expect. As it turns out, simply sitting in the same classroom together isn’t enough to remedy timeworn prejudices. The benefits of interracial contact are conditional.

Americans still appear to believe in the value of integrated education. A 2017 poll by Phi Delta Kappa, the professional organization for educators, found that 70 percent of parents would like to have their child in a racially diverse school. But 57 percent prize proximity over diversity. Only one-quarter of those who’d like a diverse school say they’d be willing to make a longer commute to get to one. Our persistently segregated neighborhoods make that a challenge across the nation.

Researchers have identified key elements that can improve school performance. They rest on a basic principle: Students need to feel individually valued and respected, connected to both the people and the process involved in their education. Those psychological factors can affect how and how much our children learn.

When it comes to everyday practices that teachers are encouraged to try in school settings to address racial issues, empathy, wise feedback, affirmation, and high-quality contact tend to get short shrift. Instead, 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.

When we’re afraid, unwilling, or ill equipped to talk about race, we leave young people to their own devices to make sense of the conflicts and disparities they see. In fact, the color-blind approach has consequences that can actually impede our move toward equality. When pe...

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.”

Feeling outnumbered can signal a threat to the legacy of dominance and the white privilege that affords. That can seed fear and resentment, which can fuel desperate measures to reclaim primacy. Being reminded of an “increasingly diverse racial landscape” leads some whites to express a stronger preference to interact exclusively with members of their own racial group, to feel that discrimination against whites is on the rise, and to endorse more politically conservative views and policies.

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.

She’d been primed by that march to link white skin with violence—just as we are primed all our lives to see random black men in that light. It was as if someone had flipped the script of her life, and the nice white lady lawyer was suddenly looking at life through a black-person lens.

The mistake we keep making—the mistake we all keep making—is in thinking that our work is done. That whatever heroic effort we’ve made will keep moving us forward. That whatever progress we’ve seen will keep us from sliding back to burning crosses and hiding Torah scrolls. But this moment in Charlottesville is our lot, our inheritance. This is where our history and our brain machinery strand us—time and time again. Moving forward requires continued vigilance. It requires us to constantly attend to who we are, how we got that way, and all the selves we have the capacity to be.