Implicit Bias or Being A Racist?
By: Rosaline Dou
It has been old news that an Asian American female reporter asked President Trump, why testing is a global competition to him. She got an answer of “that’s a question you should ask China,” and was cut off from the question. I started to think about how people think of me, as a Chinese studying in the US all alone. Are they going to blame me for the pandemic? In class, I’ve heard a lot of conversations about the virus. The question I heard most often is that, did Chinese people actually eat bats? Or some statements like, it’s all because of the Chinese. I was there, in the classroom, but not knowing if they are blaming me specifically? Do they notice my existence as a Chinese there?
These subtle instances of other-ing by the peers and the community that I have come to envision as my own make me wonder, am I surrounded by bad people who want to intentionally make me feel like I do not belong? Like I, or people like me, are the reasons for this global crisis? Is everyone I know racist?
Implicit biases are unconscious and automatic associations between social groups and positive or negative properties that we may hold as mental schemas (Peters, 2018). Because they are outside of our conscious reasoning, implicit biases often go unchecked even in reasoning processes driven by accuracy goals. For example, the medical students tested by Hoffman et al. (2016) likely held implicit biases about Black people as being more biologically strong and therefore evaluated them to have lower pain tolerance. Operating on this implicit bias, they made faulty decisions about treatment even though they had an accuracy goal and worked in the field of medicine which relies on objective metrics of assessment (such as heart rate, palpitations, temperature etc.). In sum, reasoning driven by the desire to be accurate is also motivated and often fraught with implicit biases.
Is the pursuit of “pure” reasoning unadulterated by our personal goals possible? Amidst the inevitability of motivated reasoning, is there any hope that we can develop a social climate in which motivated reasoning does not cause systematic negative consequences for some groups? With our current cognitive constraints, we can still find ways to be less biased. Group members can keep checks and balances on each other. For example, research suggests that in groups such as organisations, promoting healthy discussions and encouraging individuals to raise their opinions can help reduce members’ prejudice (Dovidio, 2000). Moreover, given that most of us are well-intentioned individuals, simply being aware of our biases may help reduce individuals’ biases. For example, a study conducted on jurors found that making jurors aware of racial biases, and the fact that most people have implicit racial biases, reduced their implicit biases.
Importantly, jurors who were well-intentioned and wished to reduce their own prejudice reported lower implicit bias (Lee, 2017). Many scientific fields have now de-biased their methods by adopting double-blind review procedures, pre-registering their research protocols and employing rigorous peer-review checks prior to publication to weed out researchers’ and editors’ biases (McKiernan et al., 2016). Further, us human beings are also limited by the confines of our knowledge. There could possibly be higher-order, non-human cognitive processes enabling un-motivated reasoning which exists beyond the limits of our current consciousness and imagination.
People are, sometimes, driven by their implicit belief or motivation, but unaware of it comes to their conscious, as how my classmates are asking questions or making certain assumptions. That doesn’t mean they are bad people, or being racists. The more important here is that we pay more attention to our thoughts, and potential implicit bias we have. So that, we are not driven by our implicit bias that we might later consider inappropriate to talk about.