Implicit bias has become a popular talking point. Across social media, nonscientists are sharing links to the Implicit Associations Test (IAT)—an assessment developed by psychologists to measure the strength of our unconscious, automatic associations about such concepts as race or gender. Schools, law enforcement agencies and workplaces have implemented seminars or workshops designed to reduce bias.
It's a bit hasty, says Patricia Devine, PhD, a social psychologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. "People are interested in, if not desperate for, strategies to ensure the workplace and educational settings are fair, and a lot of efforts are very well intentioned," she says. "But we're still early in evaluating the effectiveness of these measures."
Social psychologist Anthony Greenwald, PhD, at the University of Washington, and colleagues introduced the IAT in 1998. Since then, it's been widely used across social psychology research and has become the centerpiece of Project Implicitopens in new window, a nonprofit organization and research collaboration that aims to raise awareness and collect data from Internet users willing to click through the many variations of the IAT.
Collectively, those data have shown that while the effects of implicit bias are often statistically small, they can have significant influences on real-world behavior. In one review, for example, John T. Jost, PhD, at New York University and colleagues summarized evidence from 10 studies, demonstrating that implicit racial and gender biases influence outcomes including job interviews and hiring practices, police behavior and access to medical treatment (Research in Organizational Behavioropens in new window, 2009).
Yet while implicit bias can influence our behavior in many ways, the IAT is hardly a litmus test of good character.
"I think the IAT is most useful as a tool to help reveal to people that they have these kinds of associations," says Devine. "I worry about people thinking they can use this as a measure of who is going to show the most bias."
Tools for change. To understand the influence of implicit bias, it helps to remember that it is a facet of normal cognitive processing, says Jack Glaser, PhD, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Our brains are wired to put things into boxes. When we're exposed to a member of a given category, we automatically activate related memories. That's true for all kinds of categories, including race, ethnicity and gender, he says.
As long as we live in an environment saturated with stereotypes that reinforce those disparities, implicit biases will be almost impossible to extinguish, Glaser says. "Implicit bias is really just an emergent property of the larger historical and structural inequities we have," he says. "At this stage it would be irresponsible for anybody to claim that an implicit bias training or seminar is going to meaningfully and lastingly reduce the effects of implicit bias."
That's not to say there's no value in trainings to highlight the influence of unconscious stereotypes, however. "The utility in these activities is in raising awareness of the problem, so people can start to recognize the limits of their objectivity," Glaser says.
Devine agrees that implicit biases seem frustratingly sticky. In 2012, she and her colleagues reported on a multi-faceted, 45-minute intervention that led to reductions in racial bias lasting at least eight weeks (Journal of Experimental Social Psychologyopens in new window, 2012). But in attempts to replicate that finding, she says, she's found control subjects also show lower bias over time, suggesting the result might be partly due to practice effects on the IAT rather than true, lasting reductions in bias.
However, such interventions could have positive effects even if they don't snuff out implicit beliefs per se. Devine has found that people who participated in her intervention were more motivated to speak out against discrimination, even two years after the training period. That motivation, she says, is a step in the right direction—but researchers have more work to do to find lasting ways to reduce bias. "Awareness isn't enough," Devine says. "You have to give people the tools to import into their everyday lives."
–Kirsten Weir