Implicit Bias and Analyses of Discrimination
October 10, 2015
I recently had the opportunity to participate in a symposium at Humboldt University, Berlin, on Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen’s recent book on discrimination: Born Free and Equal? A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of Discrimination. The book offers an analysis of the notion of discrimination, and tackles some questions in which the concept is implicated (the relationship …
Bias mitigation
September 22, 2015
On Friday I gave a talk on cognitive and implicit biases, to a group of employment tribunal judges. The judges were a great audience, far younger, more receptive and more diverse than my own prejudices had led me to expect, and I enjoyed the opportunity to think about the area of cognitive bias, and how …
Implicit Race Bias and the Anatomy of Institutional Racism
February 26, 2015
I recently had the opportunity to speak at an event organised by The Monitoring Group and the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, on Police Corruption, Spying, Racism and Accountability. At this conference, a range of participants from activist groups, academia, legal teams and victims of injustice spoke – often powerfully and movingly – on …
Gender bias in sacrificing decisions
February 23, 2015
Imagine that you are the driver of a train full of passengers rushing through a tunnel. You are quickly approaching the end of the tunnel, but what is that? Another train is blocking the track and you realize with horror that a collision will lead to a disaster involving the death of many passengers. You …
Bias, Awareness and Imperfect Cognitions
December 5, 2014
Are we aware of our implicit biases? If not, does this affect our responsibility for being biased and behaving in biased ways? The stakes here are pretty high, if implicit bias is, as recently argued, involved in the appallingly numerous cases of police shootings of African American males. In a recent paper, I argue that …
The minimal cognitive commitment model of implicit bias
September 18, 2014
Previously, we have discussed (one, two) the multiple meanings of implicit in implicit biases. Implicit is often intepreted as implying ‘unconscious’ in some strong sense (in the popular press), or as implying a lack of awareness and control (in the scholarly literature). Even in the scholarly literature it is rarely systemmatically defined exacly what kind …
Implicit racism in academia
September 7, 2014
Subtle racism is prevalent in US and UK universities, according to a new paper commissioned by the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education and released last week, reports The Times Higher Education. Black professors surveyed for the paper said they were treated differently than white colleagues in the form of receiving less eye contact or requests …
Report on our first testing
August 8, 2014
Before the undergraduates escaped for their summer break we managed to subject some of them to the first large-scale trial of our IAT software. 83 participants undertook 2 positive/negative association IATs (a black vs white racial IAT & a Muslim vs Non-Muslim religion IAT). They also answered a series of explicit question about their views …
The ‘Bias’ in Implicit Bias
March 24, 2014
What is it about some implicit associations that should lead us to characterise them as ‘biases’? The idea of ‘bias’ has been unpacked in other philosophical debates, notably, by feminist philosophers concerned with bias in scientific methodology. For example, a candidate understanding of bias is offered by Louise Antony (1993) as an interest or perspective …
