reading between the lines: uncovering unconscious bias

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Reading between the Lines: Uncovering Unconscious Bias

john a. powell

Williams Chair in Civil Rights & Civil Liberties, Moritz College of Law

Director, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity

September 30, 2009

Los Angeles, California

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Presentation Overview

Unconscious networks Implicit Association

Implicit Bias Priming Race-Neutrality? Additional Links

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The Conscious & Unconscious Mind

2% of emotional cognition is available to us consciously

If messages about race are not framed in terms that address conscious networks, unconscious attitudes will triumph

Racial bias tends to reside more in the unconscious network “You want to appeal to the level of consciousness

that activates the right emotions.”

Source: Drew Westen, The Political Brain

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Our Unconscious Networks

What colors are the following lines of text?

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Our Unconscious Networks

What colors are the following lines of text?

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Our Unconscious Networks

What colors are the following lines of text?

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Our Unconscious Networks

What colors are the following lines of text?

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Our Unconscious Networks

What colors are the following lines of text?

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Implicit Association

How we behave often hinges on factors of which we are unaware

People’s minds operate through schemas “Schemas are simply templates of knowledge that help us

organize specific examples into broad categories.”

The schemas we use to categorize people are called stereotypes

Stereotyping and prejudice are not the same

Source: http://americansforamericanvalues.org/unconsciousbias/

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Implicit Association and Bias

“Both history and societal factors play a crucial role in providing the content of schemas, which are programmed through culture, media, and the material context.”

Implicit bias lives within our schemas

Bias doesn’t make you prejudiced; it makes you a person

Source: http://americansforamericanvalues.org/unconsciousbias/

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Implicit Bias – The Shooter Game

In a video-game experiment, images of suspects - both armed and unarmed, black and white – flash rapidly on a monitor. Within a split-second, subjects must decide whether to shoot.

Participants must assess whether the man in each picture is carrying a gun. Within 850 milliseconds they must press one key to shoot or another to leave the figure unharmed.

After repeated experimentation, people’s mistakes, although rare, follow a pattern: They shoot more unarmed blacks than unarmed whites; They fail to shoot more whites than blacks are holding weapons.

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What Would You Do?

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Implicit Association Test

http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2007/08/19/ https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

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Implicit Bias – Unconscious Modeling

The Kanizsa Triangle

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Implicit Bias – Unconscious Modeling

The Ponzo Illusion

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Awareness Test

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrqrkihlw-s

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Priming

Our environment affects our unconscious networks

Priming activates mental associations Telling someone a scary story activates a frame of fear

Claude Steele’s “stereotype threat”: For example, tell students about to take a test that Asian

students tend to do better than whites, and the whites will perform significantly worse than if they had not been primed to think of themselves as less capable than Asians.

Source: http://www.eaop.ucla.edu/0405/Ed185%20-Spring05/Week_6_May9_2005.pdf

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Race-Neutrality?

Given the forces of implicit bias, framing, and priming, race neutrality is neither reasonable nor effective

It is important to understand implicit bias and how it operates in order to understand how it affects our society

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www.KirwanInstitute.org

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Links

http://americansforamericanvalues.org/ https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

Examples of priming http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrqrkihlw-s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqGqGwRaILg