Biased

by Jennifer L. Eberhardt

When asked later which faces they recognized, the participants were better able to remember the ones with the Latino hairstyles—those faces that they perceived as belonging to their own group. Simply presenting them as in-group members allowed the study participants to remember their faces more readily than they remembered those same faces when the hairstyles suggested those people were black.

And 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.”

That “respect deficit” with black drivers emerged early—during the first five seconds of a stop, before the driver even had a chance to speak—and persisted throughout the course of the interaction. That’s in line with what happened during my traffic stop in Boston well over two decades ago. And our research showed that black police officers were just as likely as white officers to exhibit less respect to black drivers. The drivers’ race trumped the officers’ race. In fact, the officer who pulled me over and arrested me in Boston was black.

turns out that based on the officers’ words alone, our researchers could use a simple computational model to predict whether the person an officer had stopped was black or white.

When we returned to class, I could tell they were excited to get my feedback. I cringed as I thought about giving them papers nearly obliterated by a cover of red ink. Why had I been so harsh? I tried to soften the blow with a rambling explanation about how all my comments were offered in the spirit of making their papers better. They were confused by their professor’s unease. Did my Stanford students have a problem with harsh feedback? they asked. “Sometimes,” I said. “When you have people who are used to getting positive feedback their whole lives and you tell them something different …” I caught vague expressions of amusement on their faces and cut my answer short. I was trying to brace them for something—negative feedback—that had been a fixture in their lives. Criticism was a way of life for them. They couldn’t understand why I felt compelled to shield them from harsh honesty. “Some of us are doing life,” one student reminded me. “I think we can handle a little red-pen criticism.” I handed back the papers. Their heads went down to study my comments. After some time, their heads lifted, and some seemed moved to near tears. “I just can’t even believe it,” one man said. “Somebody sat down and spent all this time on my paper, thinking of what would make it better and how I can improve. That’s never happened to me before.”

In a set of online studies, we asked practicing teachers in a variety of schools across different parts of the country to read the office-referral record of a middle school student who had misbehaved in some benign way, like sleeping in class. We gave the student either a stereotypically black-sounding name or a white-sounding name. We found that the race of the student did not initially influence how teachers judged the severity of the infraction or what discipline they’d recommend. But when we informed teachers that this same student had misbehaved a second time, everything changed. Teachers felt more troubled by the second infraction when the student was perceived to be black than when he was presented as white. And they wished to see stronger disciplinary action taken against the black student.

In a study led by social psychologists Evan Apfelbaum and Nalini Ambady, that idea was put to the test. The researchers exposed sixty mostly white fourth- and fifth-grade students from public schools in the Boston area to a videotaped message promoting racial equality. For some of the children, color blindness was encouraged: “We all have to work hard to support racial equality. That means we need to focus on how we are similar to our neighbors rather than how we are different. We want to show everyone that race is not important and we are all the same.” For the remaining children, valuing diversity was encouraged: “We all have to work hard to support racial equality. That means we need to recognize how we are different from our neighbors and appreciate those differences. We want to show everyone that race is important because our racial differences make each of us special.” Next, all of the children listened to stories about incidents that involved other children. Some had clear racial components, like the story of a black child being intentionally tripped by another child while playing soccer, simply because he was black. Even in a situation like that, only 50 percent of those in the color-blind mind-set identified the action as discriminatory. In the diversity-minded group, nearly 80 percent saw discrimination as a factor. And when teachers later watched video recordings of the children describing the incidents, the teachers who listened to the descriptions of children ...

We’ve been so focused on explaining and eradicating implicit bias that we did not attend adequately to the capacity for implicit bias to become starkly and dangerously explicit again. Now shifting social and political norms are giving once-closeted bigots a mouthpiece and a voice.

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 men were expected to be high achievers in the workplace; the women were expected to get along with everyone. Those expectations shape what people focus on and what they perceive.

I have a different perspective. It’s not that social scientists are too fast to act; we are too slow. There is so much concern over the prospect of acting before we know enough about a phenomenon that we never get around to taking action. And because the scientific enterprise is iterative, we never seem to get to the point where we think we know enough. Social scientists fret so much about the purity and precision of science that we rarely throw ourselves into the messy problems of the world. From my perspective, engaging in the world, tackling thorny problems, can open the way to scientific discovery. If we don’t know enough as scientists to shed light on a problem, sometimes it is because we simply aren’t close enough to it.

Most trainers in the business today are not scientists trying to solve the mysteries of the mind but entrepreneurs trying to deliver a message and sell a product that is in high demand. In fact, given the stakes, it may be simpler not to know whether the training works or why it may be less likely to work under certain conditions.

When something is regarded as a norm, people cease to judge it harshly. They are not only inclined to believe that the norm is just “the way things are”; they are inclined to believe that something normative is “the way things should be.” They feel less agency and less motivation to change.

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.