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Implicit Bias & The Implicit Association Test

"It lurks in the mind's dark basement, secretly shaping our opinions, attitudes, and stereotypes. This devious manipulator does its best to twist our behavior to its nefarious end. Its stock in trade: stirring up racial prejudice and a host of other pernicious preconceptions about members of various groups. Upstairs, our conscious mind ignores this pushy cellar dweller and assumes that we're decent folk whose actions usually reflect good intentions. Welcome to the disturbing world of implicit bias." - Bruce Bower

How would you react if someone told you that you were biased? What would you do if you found out that your brain was pre-wired to be biased? What if you learned that being biased was a matter of survival?

Here’s the deal: our brains are pre-wired to use contextual cues to extract meaning. Our ability to distinguish between danger and safety, friend and foe are all due to our ability to extract meaning from contextual cues. We use these contextual cues to process the limited information we have and when the context is unfamiliar our brain fills in its own best guess. So despite our best conscious efforts, we can still possess negative prejudices and stereotypes which shape how we view different people and how we act in different circumstances.

Studies in neuroscience have shown that unconscious or implicit bias, which is often unnoticed, remains as "mental residue" in all of us. One's willingness to be aware of his or her own biases is the first essential step to understanding how it affects our everyday decision-making and interactions, not to mention, how we can mitigate its effects and combat social stereotypes.

Tools

Assess and test your unconscious preferences for over 90 different topics ranging from ethnic groups to sports teams and from pets to political issues. Visit Project Implicit: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/

Training

Learn more about purchasing a training course on Uncovering Implicit Bias in the Workplace by visiting: www.workplaceanswers.com/products/DiversityBias.aspx

Studies

Implicit Bias in Recruitment/Hiring

Discover how bias creeps into the search practices of recruitment firms who consider themselves to be fair and objective. A recent resume study conducted by a team of economists found that candidates with "white-sounding" names received 50% more call-backs for jobs than those with "African-American sounding" names, even though the resumes were almost identical. Read the summary of "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination." *

We perform a field experiment to measure racial discrimination in the labor market. We respond with fictitious resumes to help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate perception of race, each resume is assigned either a very African American sounding name or a very White sounding name. The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for African Americans, it elicits a far smaller increase. Applicants living in better neighborhoods receive more callbacks but, interestingly, this effect does not differ by race. The amount of discrimination is uniform across occupations and industries. Federal contractors and employers who list Equal Opportunity Employer' in their ad discriminate as much as other employers. We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names. These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market.

The authors took the content of 500 real resumes off online job boards and then evaluated them, as objectively as possible, for quality, using such factors as education and experience. Then they replaced the names with made-up names picked to "sound white" or "sound black" and responded to 1,300 job ads in The Boston Globe and Chicago Tribune last year.

Previous studies have examined how employers responded to similarly qualified applicants they meet in person, but this experiment attempted to isolate the response to the name itself.

White names got about one callback per 10 resumes; black names got one per 15. Carries and Kristens had call-back rates of more than 13 percent, but Aisha, Keisha and Tamika got 2.2 percent, 3.8 percent and 5.4 percent, respectively. And having a higher quality resume, featuring more skills and experience, made a white-sounding name 30 percent more likely to elicit a callback, but only 9 percent more likely for black-sounding names.

Even employers who specified "equal opportunity employer" showed bias, leading Mullainathan to suggest companies serious about diversity must take steps to confront even unconscious biases - for instance, by not looking at names when first evaluating a resume.

Bertrand, M. and Mullainathan, S. 2004. "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination." The American Economic Review, 94(4), 1-31

Internal Resume Study

Are your company’s recruiting and hiring processes truly fair and unbiased? Conduct your own internal resume study to find out! Read the guidelines:

Download full study

Implicit Bias in Performance Reviews

Learn how performance-based reward systems can actually increase race and gender bias in workplace. Read the summary of the 2008 MIT study on "Gender, Race, and Meritocracy in Organizational Careers."

This study helps to fill a significant gap in the literature on organizations and inequality by investigating the central role of merit-based reward systems in shaping gender and racial disparities in wages and promotions. The author develops and tests a set of propositions isolating processes of performance-reward bias, whereby women and minorities receive less compensation than white men with equal scores on performance evaluations. Using personnel data from a large service organization, the author empirically establishes the existence of this bias and shows that gender, race, and nationality differences continue to affect salary growth after performance ratings are taken into account, ceteris paribus. This finding demonstrates a critical challenge faced by the many contemporary employers who adopt merit-based practices and policies. Although these policies are often adopted in the hope of motivating employees and ensuring meritocracy, policies with limited transparency and accountability can actually increase ascriptive bias and reduce equity in the workplace.*

*Emilio Castilla, "Gender, Race, and Meritocracy in Organizational Careers," May 2008.

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Implicit Bias and the Law

Read the summary of a Harvard law study called "The Law of Implicit Bias" and learn some of the legal challenges associated with implicit bias.

Considerable attention has been given to the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which finds that most people have an implicit and unconscious bias against members of traditionally disadvantaged groups. Implicit bias poses a special challenge for antidiscrimination law because it suggests the possibility that people are treating others differently even when they are unaware that they are doing so. Some aspects of current law operate, whether intentionally or not, as controls on implicit bias; it is possible to imagine other efforts in that vein. An underlying suggestion is that implicit bias might be controlled through a general strategy of "de-biasing through law."*

*Christine Jolls and Cass Sunstein. "The Law of Implicit Bias." Harvard Law School. 2006.

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