January 29, 2014, by Jules Holroyd
Awareness of Implicit Bias?
There’s a nice video that gives some details of studies on implicit bias over at the Feminist Philosophers Blog. These studies are relevant to biases that influence hiring and evaluation decisions, and show that biases about race, gender, sexual orientation and parenting role can influence judgements of individuals’ skills.
Apart from providing useful information about the contexts in which biases of various kinds might be operative, this video is interesting to us because of the remarks at the end: the claim that becoming aware of implicit biases is part of combating them. This seems obvious in one sense: you can’t act to mitigate bias if you don’t know you’re likely to have them, or when they’re likely to be operative.
However, we’re interested in a range of senses in which awareness might be relevant to combating bias. There are different senses of awareness in the literature (this is something I say more about in a forthcoming paper, Implicit biases, Awareness and Epistemic Innocence). Sometimes authors are concerned with (1) introspective awareness of the existence of an implicit bias. Other authors are concerned with (2) awareness of a body of knowledge about implicit bias, from which individuals can infer their likely propensity to bias. Other authors still are concerned with (3) observational awareness of one’s own actions, and the extent to which one is able to attribute this to implicit attitudes.
Why is distinguishing these different senses of awareness important? One reason is clarity: there has been dispute over whether individuals have ‘awareness of’ implicit biases, and one explanation for this disagreement is that the parties to the dispute are talking about different senses of awareness (1 and 3, I think). Another reason is that some recent studies have claimed that being aware of implicit bias itself can mitigate the expression of bias (Pope et al). If this is true, then we need to be clear on which kind of awareness is in play here, and recommend the right kind to mitigate bias (it seems that it is the second kind of awareness at issue in the Pope et al paper).
A third reason is one that is relevant to our studies on blaming people for implicit bias. We want to measure the effects of blame on how much bias is expressed, and be able to compare this with other conditions: including making people aware of implicit bias, and a control condition (in which no information is given). So one thing we need to think about is which sense of awareness we should isolate and incorporate into our study.
The distinction between awareness 1,2 & 3 is very useful. It is not clear 1 is even possible for a truly implicit bias. I guess this is part of what you are referring to when you say that the dispute over whether individuals have ‘awareness of’ implicit biases may be caused by different authors using different sense of awareness.
I guess 1 is the sense that some would say is necessarily lacking wrt implicit bias – some have even defined it in this way (Kelly & Washington, e.g.).
If it is supposed to be definitional that implicit bias is not introspectively accessible, then those who deny this would either be bringing to bear some evidence that the definers haven’t seen; or they’d be talking past each other (in the sense that they’d have different target states/processes in mind…). Right?
I wonder which sense you reckon is the most pertinent to our study?
I think we need to talk more about what defines “implicit”. Some psychologists (e.g. David Shanks at UCL have argued that there is no unconscious – in the sense of inaccessible – knowledge). Others (e.g. John Bargh) have defined unconscious factors as anything that you don’t report at the time as influencing you. This, for me, is very problemmatic, because whether or not I report something as influencing me can be due to a number of factors, only some of which are due to the implicit/explicit nature of the associations I possess
Hmmm- ‘don’t report’ or ‘can’t report’?
Does the Shank claim that there is no inaccessible knowledge extend as far as the claim there are no inaccessible associations? I agree that the Bargh definition is not great because people may be aware of something they are not reporting. However, there may be something to the idea that a bias is implicit if the person is unaware it is influencing them. The problem is that definition is much harder (perhaps impossible) to operationalise which probably explains why Bargh uses the definition he does.
I think there is an important distinction to be made between two ways in which a bias may be implicit which is akin to the difference between awareness 1 & 3:
1) A bias being implicit because the person is unaware they hold a particular view or have a particular association. In this case the bias is the implicit thing.
2) The person being unaware that a particular view or association is influencing a particular decision or action. In this case it is the influence of the bias which is implicit.
Some recent and relevant literature
Hahn, A., Judd, C. M., Hirsh, H. K., & Blair, I. V. (2013). Awareness of Implicit Attitudes. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General. doi:10.1037/a0035028
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24294868
Thanks Tom – I’ll go read that!
Hi, I hope you don’t mind my commenting, but Lily FitzGibbon has literally just pointed me in your direction and I couldn’t help, but jump in on this debate. The general concensus is that automatic attitudes are instrospectively accessible, however, some actively avoid doing so. Greenwald et al. (1995) caused some confusion around the term implicit when they suggested that implicit biases are “introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate responses”. However, they have since clarified this statement to mean a lack of awareness of the source of the attitude, not the attitude itself. I’ve found Timothy Wilson’s notion of the adaptive unconscious to useful in understanding this concept and handily have a link to a talk he gave here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arKt35LCzUE.
Best wishes,
John
Hi Jon, thanks for that, and for the video, which I will watch with interest. Interesting that there is such a divergence of views – in philosophy, it is not uncommon to find implicit associations described as ‘unconscious’, and I’ve come across some psychology papers that write likewise – so interesting that others think it is clear that this is wrong. (For what it is worth, I don’t think it matters whether individuals have introspective access to their biases, as much as that they can notice that they are behaving in a biased way – at least not from the point of view of responsibility. I think this for the reasons mentioned here! https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/biasandblame/2014/12/05/bias-awareness-and-imperfect-cognitions/)