Race on the Brain

What Implicit Bias Gets Wrong About the Struggle for Racial Justice

Jonathan Kahn

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231545389
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Of the many obstacles to racial justice in America, none has received more recent attention than the one that lurks in our subconscious. As social movements and policing scandals have shown how far from being "postracial" we are, the concept of implicit bias has taken center stage in the national conversation about race. Millions of Americans have taken online tests purporting to show the deep, invisible roots of their own prejudice. A recent Oxford study that claims to have found a drug that reduces implicit bias is only the starkest example of a pervasive trend. But what do we risk when we seek the simplicity of a technological diagnosis—and solution—for racism? What do we miss when we locate racism in our biology and our brains rather than in our history and our social practices?

In Race on the Brain, Jonathan Kahn argues that implicit bias has grown into a master narrative of race relations—one with profound, if unintended, negative consequences for law, science, and society. He emphasizes its limitations, arguing that while useful as a tool to understand particular types of behavior, it is only one among several tools available to policy makers. An uncritical embrace of implicit bias, to the exclusion of power relations and structural racism, undermines wider civic responsibility for addressing the problem by turning it over to experts. Technological interventions, including many tests for implicit bias, are premised on a color-blind ideal and run the risk of erasing history, denying present reality, and obscuring accountability. Kahn recognizes the significance of implicit social cognition but cautions against seeing it as a panacea for addressing America's longstanding racial problems. A bracing corrective to what has become a common-sense understanding of the power of prejudice, Race on the Brain challenges us all to engage more thoughtfully and more democratically in the difficult task of promoting racial justice.

1

DEFINING AND MEASURING IMPLICIT BIAS

The study of implicit social cognition “examines those mental processes that operate without conscious awareness or conscious control but nevertheless influence fundamental evaluations of individuals and groups.”1 It is grounded primarily in the field of psychology but has been taken up by many other fields, including neuroscience.2 Ralph Adolphs, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology, has complained that “social cognition is a domain with fuzzy boundaries and vaguely specified components.” Nonetheless, he recognizes that it can be understood as guiding “both automatic and volitional behavior by participating in a variety of processes that modulate behavioral response: memory, decision-making, attention, motivation and emotion are all prominently recruited when socially relevant stimuli elicit behavior.”3

ISC’s potential for political applications is made abundantly clear in an article titled “Political Neuroscience: The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship,” in which an interdisciplinary group of coauthors assert that “the application of neuroscience to political topics offers a powerful set of research methods that promises to integrate multiple levels of analysis. As E. O. Wilson (1998) wrote in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge: ‘the social sciences are intrinsically compatible with the natural sciences. The two great branches of learning will benefit to the extent that their modes of causal explanation are made consistent.’ ”4

Psychologists Curtis Hardin and Mahzarin Banaji assert that “implicit prejudice” itself “(a) operates unintentionally and outside awareness, (b) is empirically distinct from explicit prejudice, and (c) uniquely predicts consequential social judgment and behavior.”5 Thus, as other authors assert, “people can have implicit prejudices—feelings, favorable or unfavorable, toward persons or groups that they did not endorse or even realize that they possessed.”6

ISC emerged from a history of psychological studies of prejudice that John Dovidio has broadly characterized as happening in three waves. The first wave, from the 1920s through the 1950s, cast prejudice as form of psychopathology involving “not simply a disruption in rational processes, but as a dangerous aberration from normal thinking.” The second wave, lasting until the early 1990s, “began with an opposite assumption: Prejudice is rooted in normal rather than abnormal processes.” This approach conceived of prejudice, stereotyping, and bias as “outcomes of normal cognitive processes associated with simplifying and storing information of overwhelming quantity and complexity that people encounter in daily life.” Beginning in the mid-1990s, a third wave—the current wave—emerged that “emphasizes the multidimensional aspect of prejudice and takes advantage of new technologies to study processes that were earlier hypothesized but not directly measurable.” During this wave, psychologists developed the IAT and more recently fMRI studies of neuropsychological processes to produce “a more comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and multidimensional understanding of prejudice.”7 This current interdisciplinary approach is notable for its focus on quantifiable, measurable, and (in the case of fMRI) visualizable metrics of prejudice.

Despite this rather sequential characterization, it bears noting that each “wave” did not simply supersede and render prior research irrelevant. Rather, these waves are best understood as building upon, interweaving with, and influencing one another—more like marbled layers of research than distinct historical strata. Thus, for example, many scholars remain deeply concerned with what they see to be the pathologies of racism—particularly in its most extreme forms—though they may also embrace current work on ISC.

HEURISITICS AND BIASES

Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s profoundly influential article “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” was published in 1974, during the “second wave,” but it remains of fundamental significance to the work of ISC theorists in general and of behavioral realists in the law in particular.8 Among scholars during the “third wave,” Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald, writing from within the discipline of psychology, as well as Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, writing from within economics and law, draw directly and heavily on this work. Banaji and Greenwald refer to the “heuristics and biases” identified by Tversky and Kahneman as “mind bugs,” which are “ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason, and make decisions.”9 Thaler and Sunstein simply call them “rules of thumb.”10 They identify these mind bugs or rules of thumb with three key heuristics analyzed by Tversky and Kahneman as centrally shaping the way people use shortcuts to make sense of the complicated array of information that we encounter in everyday life: anchoring, availability, and representativeness.

Banaji and Greenwald observe that “the mind does not search for information in a vacuum. Rather, it starts by using whatever information is immediately available as a reference point or ‘anchor’ and then adjusting.”11 Thaler and Sunstein illustrate the concept of anchoring by considering how they, living in Chicago, might respond to a request to guess the population of Milwaukee, about two hours away. They know little about Milwaukee other than that it is the largest city in Wisconsin. So they start with something they do know, the population of Chicago, which is roughly three million. This is their anchor. Working from this number, they consider that Milwaukee is a major city but clearly isn’t as big as Chicago, perhaps one-third its size, so they estimate its population at one million. Then, they compare this process to that of a hypothetical resident of Green Bay, Wisconsin, who uses Green Bay’s population of one hundred thousand as his anchor and guesses that Milwaukee is three times as big—three hundred thousand. Like Banaji and Greenwald, Thaler and Sunstein refer to this process as “anchoring and adjustment”—in conditions of uncertainty, you start with the anchor you know and adjust from there. The problem is that the adjustment is often insufficient, creating a bias toward the anchor. In their example, they note that the population of Milwaukee is actually about 580,000 people.12

Banaji and Greenwald illustrate the availability heuristic by asking the reader, “Pick the correct answer in each of the following three pairs: Each year, do more people in the United States die from cause (a) or cause (b)?”

1. (a) murder (b) diabetes
2. (a) murder (b) suicide
3. (a) car accidents (b) abdominal cancer13

They note that most people chose (b) for question 1 and (a) for questions 2 and 3. In fact, the correct answer to each question is (b). The availability heuristic means that “when instances of one type of event (such as murder rather than suicide) come more easily to mind than those of another type, we tend to assume that the first event also must occur more frequently in the world.”14

Thaler and Sunstein characterize “representiveness” simply as the idea “that when asked to judge how likely it is that A belongs to category B, people … answer by asking themselves how similar A is to their image or stereotype of B (that is, how ‘representative’ A is of B).”15 Given representativeness’s direct connection to stereotyping, one can readily appreciate its implications for understanding implicit prejudice.

EXPLICIT AND IMPLICIT BIAS

Such cognitive heuristics are understood as operating largely at an unconscious or implicit level in contrast to realms of more conscious, explicit deliberation and awareness. Daniel Kahneman popularized this “dual-system” model in his best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow, where he describes it as follows:

• System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
• System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.16

This dual-system model applies across a wide range of cognitive tasks but has been particularly significant in framing discussions of ISC and drawing distinctions between implicit and explicit bias. It suffuses Thaler and Sunstein’s work, who state baldly that it is “how we think.” They describe the dual-system model as involving “a distinction between two types of thinking, one that is intuitive and automatic and another that is reflective and rational.”17

Among psychologists, David Amodio and Saaid Mendoza use the terms implicit and explicit to refer to a subject’s own awareness of a particular psychological process, such as bias: “an explicit process can be consciously detected and reported (regardless of whether it was triggered spontaneously). Any process that is not explicit is referred to as implicit. Hence, ‘implicit’ describes a process that cannot be directly inferred through introspective awareness.”18

Psychologists Brian Nosek and Rachel Siskind offer a slightly different definition, asserting that “implicit social cognition” is not a specific psychological process but rather “is a descriptive term encompassing thoughts and feelings that occur independently of conscious intention, awareness, or control.”19 Anthony Greenwald and Linda Hamilton Krieger also emphasize awareness and control, noting that “a belief is explicit if it is consciously endorsed,” whereas implicit cognition involves “processes of social perception, impression formation, and judgment” over which a person “may not always have conscious, intentional control.”20

Implicit bias involves three basic steps: the mental recognition or construction of a social group; the association of a stereotype with that group; and the layering of a positive or negative association or attitude on top of the stereotype. Social psychologists define a social stereotype as “a mental association between a social group and a category or trait.”21 Stereotypes in themselves are not necessarily normative. In contrast, an attitude is “an evaluative disposition, that is, the tendency to like or dislike, or to act favorably or unfavorably toward someone or something.”22 Implicit biases, therefore, “are discriminatory biases based on implicit attitudes or implicit stereotypes.”23 Implicit attitudes may be related to explicit attitudes, “but [the two] are distinct in that neither is robustly predictive of the other.”24 Of particular interest are situations in which explicit and implicit attitudes toward the same object differ. These dissociations are most commonly observed with respect to stigmatized groups, such as racial minorities.25

MEASURING IMPLICIT BIAS

As Amodio notes, “Many of the central components of intergroup bias (e.g., the construct of implicit bias) are exceedingly difficult to study using the traditional methods of social psychology, as they appear to be impervious to introspection, and thus to self-report.”26 The science of ISC began to gain traction in the 1990s as psychologists developed new techniques for measuring and quantifying it. At a larger social level, bias (both implicit and explicit) may often be inferred from significant statistical disparities in the treatment of racial groups with respect to a particular practice. Thus, for example, the phenomenon of differential traffic stops by police that has come to be known as “driving while black” became the basis for a number of successful lawsuits challenging racial profiling.27 One early study done in 1993 found that in a particular place where more than 98 percent of the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike were speeding, the police essentially had discretion to pull over anyone they chose. Although African Americans made up only 15 percent of the speeders, not statistically different from their proportion of the driving population, 35 percent of the drivers pulled over were black. The average black driver was almost four times more likely to be pulled over than a nonblack driver.28 Such s...