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 …
Problems with Bargh’s definition of unconscious
September 19, 2014
I have a new paper out in Frontiers in Psychology: The perspectival shift: how experiments on unconscious processing don’t justify the claims made for them. There has been ongoing consternation about the reliability of some psychology research, particularly studies which make claims about unconscious (social) priming. However, even if we assume that the empirical results …
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 …
Workshop on Implicit Cognitions, Nottingham
July 11, 2014
Some of our work will be presented at a workshop on implicit cognitions, which is part of a program of events put on by the Equality and Diversity committee of the Philosophy Department, University of Nottingham. Details are below. We’ll be presenting the experimental design we’ve been developing as part of the project, and presenting …
run your own IAT – openIAT
May 28, 2014
As part of the project, we’ve built our own Implicit Association Test (IAT) experiment for measuring implicit bias. It runs in all open source software and is freely available over at the Open Science Framework site – here: openIAT. Because it is developed in Python (an open source programming language) and PsychoPy (an open source …
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 …
What is “implicit” about implicit biases?
February 24, 2014
The discussion following Jules’ post about “awareness of implicit bias” prompted me to spend some time looking into how the term implicit is defined in the literature. What I found was a lack of consensus and often a lack of clarity surrounding the use of the term implicit. The term “Implicit” in psychology originally comes …
Homophobic bias and the effects of ‘owning’ biases
February 11, 2014
There are plenty of news stories this week of attempts to combat explicit homophobic discrimination at the Sochi winter Olympic games. Those of us who explicitly reject anti-gay bias might nonetheless be vulnerable to homophobic implicit bias; a number of studies have shown this to be one prominent sort of implicit bias that yields …
