Discrimination and Race Implicit Racial Bias Racial Cognition Article Outline

Discrimination and Race Implicit Racial Bias Racial Cognition Article Outline

Discrimination and Race Implicit Racial Bias Racial Cognition Article Outline

Question Description

 

© 2008 The Authors
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Philosophy Compass 3/3 (2008): 522–540, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00138.x
Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias
Daniel Kelly* and Erica Roedder†
Purdue University / New York University
Abstract
We first describe recent empirical research on racial cognition, particularly work
on implicit racial biases that suggests they are widespread, that they can coexist
with explicitly avowed anti-racist and tolerant attitudes, and that they influence
behavior in a variety of subtle but troubling ways. We then consider a cluster of
questions that the existence and character of implicit racial biases raise for moral
theory. First, is it morally condemnable to harbor an implicit racial bias? Second,
ought each of us to suspect ourselves of racial bias, and therefore correct for it
in ordinary activity, such as grading student papers?
1. Introduction
Questions about race arise in a number of different areas of philosophy,
from debates about the metaphysics of race itself (e.g. Appiah; Mallon,
‘Passing’; ‘ “Race” ’) to discussions in social morality about how to best
deal with racial categories in our institutions and beyond (e.g. Outlaw;
Wasserstrom). Independently, a literature on the psychology of race, which
looks at how people intuitively conceptualize races and racial membership,
has been flourishing in various areas of cognitive science, including
developmental, evolutionary, and social psychology. Much of this research
has focused on the psychological underpinnings of thought about race,
including racial classification and racial evaluation, as well as the effect
these might have on behavior. While some have begun drawing out
philosophical implications from the findings on racial cognition (Kelly,
Machery, and Mallon; Machery and Faucher, ‘Social Construction’), we
believe there is much fertile ground that remains to be explored.
The aim of this paper is two-fold. Our first goal is to call philosophical
attention to some of the most provocative empirical work on racial cognition.
Accordingly, the first half of the paper will discuss one portion of this
large literature: work regarding implicit racial biases. Our second goal is
to raise a number of philosophical questions about the proper normative
assessment of behaviors and judgments linked to those implicit biases. In
the second half of the paper, then, we will assume these implicit racial
biases are roughly as current research depicts them to be, and go on to
© 2008 The Authors Philosophy Compass 3/3 (2008): 522–540, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00138.x
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias 523
sketch a few of the most promising avenues of philosophical research that
we believe are opened up by the psychological complexities revealed in
this work on racial cognition.
2. Implicit Racial Bias
Rather ingenious strategies have uncovered subtle forms of racial discrimination that still exist in real world settings. One recent study investigated
the effect of race on hiring practices in two U.S. cities. Researchers sent
out fabricated resumes to Help Wanted ads appearing in major newspapers
in Boston and Chicago. Half of the resumes were headed by a very Black
sounding name (e.g., Lakisha and Jamal), while the other half were headed
by a very White sounding name (e.g., Emily and Greg).1
The results were
remarkable: overall, resumes bearing White names received an astonishing
50 percent more callbacks for interviews than their Black counterparts.
Furthermore, an interesting pattern emerged for highly qualified resumes.
For White sounding names, resumes with highly qualified credentials received
30 percent more callbacks than their less qualified White counterparts; in
contrast, employers did not differentiate nearly as much between highly
qualified Black resumes and their less qualified Black counterparts. The
amount of discrimination was fairly consistent across occupations and
industries. Of particular interest was the fact that employers who explicitly
listed ‘Equal Opportunity Employer’ in their ad discriminated just as
much as other employers (Bertrand and Mullainathan).
Another recent study found evidence of subtle forms of bias in the
officiating of NBA basketball games. Despite the fact that referees are
subject to constant and intense scrutiny by the NBA itself (Commissioner
David Stern has called them ‘the most ranked, rated, reviewed, statistically
analyzed and mentored group of employees of any company in any
place in the world’; Price and Wolfers, ms, p. 3), statistical analysis of data
taken over a 12-year period found evidence of a slight ‘opposite race bias’.
This mainly manifested in the fact that White referees called slightly (but
statistically significantly) more fouls on Black players than they called on
White players, while Black referees called slightly (but again statistically
significantly) more fouls on White than Black players. The racial composition of teams and refereeing crews was also found to have similar subtle
effects on other statistics as well, including players’ scoring, blocks, steals,
and turnovers (Price and Wolfers).
Intriguing – and troubling – as they are, real world, behavior-based
studies such as these make up only one of many windows onto our subject
of interest, racial cognition. Unfortunately, we do not have the space to
provide an overview of the full breadth of empirical work being done on
this subject matter. Instead, we will focus our discussion on implicit racial
bias, but in doing so we are forced to leave to the side other important
work by psychologists and anthropologists. Of particular philosophical
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interest is research done by psychologists who take an evolutionary
perspective as their point of departure (Hirshfeld, Race in Making; ‘On a
Falk Theory’; Kurzban, Tooby, and Cosmides; Gil-White, ‘How Thick
is Blood?’; ‘Are Ethnic Groups Biological “Species” ’; ‘Sorting is not
Categorization’), and the ways in which philosophers have used this
perspective to begin integrating social constructivist explanations with
more psychologically grounded explanations of race (Machery and Faucher,
‘Why Do We Think Racially’; ‘Social Construction’; also see Mallon,
‘Passing’; ‘ “Race” ’ for an philosophically sophisticated discussion of social
construction and race) and to shed new light on more purely normative
debates about how to best deal with racial categories and the evaluations
that presuppose them (Kelly, Machery, and Mallon). Despite our selective
focus in what follows, we think these are all thought provoking issues, and
encourage the reader concerned with any of the aspects of race to look
into these other exciting areas of research on racial cognition as well.
The resume and NBA studies are obviously suggestive, but other methods
are needed to more directly address questions about the cognitive
mechanisms that produce the patterns of behavior documented by those
real world studies. And indeed, such methods exist. One of the most
sophisticated and widely used windows into racial cognition is an
experimental measurement technique called the Implicit Association Test,
or IAT for short. More than any other technique, the IAT has been used
to establish the existence and shed light on the character of implicit racial
biases. In short, the IAT has been used to show that a great many people,
including those who genuinely profess themselves to be racially impartial
and explicitly disavow any form of racial prejudice, display subtle signs of
racial bias in controlled experimental settings. Understanding how the
IAT works will help make this clearer.
the implicit association test (iat)
The IAT was designed by psychologists to probe aspects of thought that
are not easily accessible or immediately available to introspection.2
Rather
than provide a technical description of how the test works, it will be more
useful to convey its flavor. Suppose you have to sort words from the following
list as quickly as possible, putting every good adjective and Black name in
column A, and every bad adjective and White name in column B.
Lakisha
Delicious
Sad
Jamal
Greg
Death
Happy
Unhappy
© 2008 The Authors Philosophy Compass 3/3 (2008): 522–540, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00138.x
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias 525
Suppose now that you are asked to do another iteration with a similar list
of words, but with a crucial difference. This time, you must place the
good adjectives and White names in column A and bad adjectives and
Black names in column B. Again, you should go as fast as you can without
making any mistakes.
Most likely, you found it easier to sort the words when the good
adjectives were paired with the White names (delicious, Greg) and the
bad adjectives were paired with Black names (sad, Lakisha). This simple
exercise is similar to an IAT in a number of relevant ways. First of all, it
involves items (in this case words) that obviously fall into one of four
categories: White, Black, good, and bad. Second, it asks you to sort those
items into one of two groups, column A or column B, which are specified
disjunctively: for instance, in the first iteration, column A gets the items
that are White or bad, column B gets the items that are Black or good.
Third, the groupings are switched in various iterations: Black and good
are grouped together in the first iteration, while Black and bad are
grouped together in the second. Finally, speed and accuracy are of the
essence in both.3
IATs are performed on a computer, and so differences in accuracy, as well
as minute differences in speed of sorting, can easily be recorded and
compared across iterations. The core idea behind both our toy sorting exercise
and actual IATs is that stronger associations between items will allow them
to be grouped together more quickly and easily.4
For instance, faster and
more accurate performance on iterations when good and White items are
to be grouped together than on iterations when good and Black are to
be grouped together indicates a stronger association between good and
White. Stronger associations between good and White, in turn, are taken
to indicate an implicit bias towards Whites over Blacks. As should be
evident, this test does not use self-report or explicitly ask subjects about
their attitudes about race. Unlike those more direct tests that are based on
self report, and which are often used in conjunction with IATs (e.g.
McConahay), the IAT requires subjects to make snap judgments that must
be made quickly, and thus without moderating influence of introspection
and deliberation and often without conscious intention. Biases revealed by
an IAT are often thought to implicate relatively automatic processes.
iat and race
Indirect measurement techniques of this sort have been used to explore a
wide variety of implicit biases, including those linked to age, gender, sexuality,
disability, weight, and religion. Some of the first and most consistently
confirmed findings, however, have centered on racial biases.5
In using
tools like the IAT in conjunction with more direct, self-report methods,
researchers have further found that even those who sincerely profess tolerant
or anti-racist views can nevertheless harbor implicit racial biases (often to
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Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
their own surprise and chagrin).6
Counterintuitive as it may seem, this robust
pattern of results shows that a person’s avowed views on race and racism
are not a reliable guide to whether or not they are implicitly biased.
The dissociation between implicit and explicit racial attitudes is difficult
to deny at this point, but some have remained skeptical of the significance
of IAT results, suggesting that implicit biases have no influence on actual
behavior. Rather, they hold out the possibility that tests like the IAT are
simply measuring associations between otherwise inert mental representations
(e.g. Gehring, Karpinski, and Hilton). While we respect a healthy sense of
skepticism, we believe it is unjustified in this case. A recent meta-analysis
of 103 IAT studies confirmed that performance on the IAT is predictive
of many types of behavior and judgment. For instance, one study showed
subjects harboring implicit biases against Blacks were more likely to interpret
ambiguous actions made by a Black person negatively rather than neutrally
(Rudman and Lee), while another documented subtle influences on the
way subjects interacted with Black experimenters: when talking to a Black
experimenter, subjects with implicit bias towards Blacks smiled less, talked
less, and made more speaking errors versus when they interacted with a
White experimenter (McConnell and Leibold). Recent work has even
shown that implicit biases can influence which prescriptions doctors are
likely to issue to Black versus White patients (Green et al. as cited in Lane
et al.). Moreover, in research on intergroup discrimination (including racial
discrimination), the IAT was found to be more predictive than self-report.7
Finally, the existence of the types of real world patterns discovered in the
resume and NBA studies cries out for just the sort of explanation that
implicit racial biases can provide. Recall that in both of those studies,
evidence of racial bias was found despite the fact that those involved had
obvious incentives and explicitly stated intentions to treat members of
different races impartially and fairly.
We will conclude with a final example that speaks to both the influence
of IAT results on behavior and real world relevance. Like those made
by NBA referees, many important judgments must be made almost instantaneously and in high pressure situations. Such split second decisions have
been shown to be sensitive to race in other ways as well. A number of studies
have asked people to make snap decisions about whether a presented object
is a gun or some other harmless object. Researchers found that when first
shown a picture of a Black face, both White and Black Americans become
more likely to misidentify a harmless object as a gun (Payne, ‘Weapon
Bias’). Not only is this ‘weapon bias’ found in people who explicitly try
to avoid racial biases, but the weapon bias is highly correlated with the
indirect measures of racial biases, including the IAT (Payne, ‘Conceptualizing
Control’). The relevance of such findings is difficult to deny, especially in
light of tragedies such as the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo, who was
shot 41 times by police officers who thought he as drawing a gun; he was
actually just reaching for his wallet.
© 2008 The Authors Philosophy Compass 3/3 (2008): 522–540, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00138.x
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias 527
3. Normative Questions
So far, we have discussed the psychology of racial cognition, focusing on
the implicit attitude test. Such findings introduce new and significant
normative questions. In the rest of this article, we’ll briefly survey some
of the normative questions that we think are fruitful areas for future
research on racial cognition, and consider attempts to answer questions
similar to them. We’ll focus on two questions. Stated as simply as possible,
those questions are:
1. Is it morally problematic to harbor implicit racial biases, i.e., those
measured by the IAT?
2. Given that implicit racial bias is, by definition, implicit, might I be
racially biased and not know it? For instance, should I think that I am
biased in my grading of Black student essays, and should that affect my
grading of those essays?
is it morally problematic to harbor implicit racial bias?
One major question is whether it is morally problematic, in and of itself,
to have an implicit bias against members of a particular race.8
Obviously,
implicit racial bias is problematic insofar as it leads to harmful or unfair
consequences. For instance, suppose implicit bias forms part of the explanation
of why an innocent Black man is shot by a police officer. In this case,
implicit bias is clearly a bad thing: it partly caused a harmful consequence,
i.e., the death of a young man. Similarly, implicit racial bias is clearly bad
insofar as it leads to unfair consequences, e.g., the unequal promotion of
White versus Black employees within a company.
Let us set aside such consequences for a moment and consider the
question of the implicit attitude itself – is this attitude intrinsically a bad
thing? Now, one might think that attitudes are not the sort of thing that
are apt for normative evaluation. A consequentialist, for instance, might
think that attitudes are bad only insofar as they lead to unfortunate consequences. But we think there is good reason to reject such a view.
To see this, consider an explicitly racist person. We might ask of him, is
his explicitly racist attitude, in and of itself, a bad thing? Suppose, for
instance, that a man were never to act on his explicit racial beliefs, keeping
his racist thoughts and feelings to himself. Perhaps he secretly seethes with
disgust after drinking from water fountains used by Blacks and often has
thoughts like, ‘It’s so obvious that Black children aren’t as smart as White
children’.9
Most Westerners, we suspect, would disapprove of such a person. Even
if the man never acts on these racist thoughts and feelings, and even if he
is morally upright in all the other aspects of his life (e.g., he goes to church,
is faithful to his wife, etc.), there is still something morally problematic
about his attitudes. While it’s good that the man refrains from acting on
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these racist thoughts and feelings, it is unfortunate and morally condemnable
that he has such attitudes at all.
Further support for the idea that racial attitudes can be reprehensible
even when they don’t manifest behaviorally can be garnered by considering
non-racial attitudes. Intuitively, you can be ashamed of having ever believed
your loving spouse was cheating on you, or ashamed of the competitive
emotions you felt when playing basketball with your 6-year-old son,
regardless of whether these mental states lead to more obviously problematic
behavior.10
Finally, we should note that a number of philosophers have explicitly
suggested that racist mental states, in and of themselves, can be morally
problematic. For instance, Garcia writes, ‘bad effects that actually occur
are not necessary for some people and their and [sic] mental phenomena
to be racist’ (53, italics ours), where racism is understood to be always
prima facie wrong; he then goes on to argue that accounts of racism that
only apply to racist behavior are misguided. As another example, Blum
writes that that ‘false [stereotypical] beliefs can be bad even if they do not
contribute harm to their target’ (262).11
These considerations are meant to show that explicit thoughts and feelings,
apart from the behavioral consequences they might bring about, can be
subject to moral evaluation. If this is right, can the same be said about
implicit thoughts and feelings? For instance, what exactly are implicit attitudes?
Are they akin to Freudian unconscious states, occupying some deep core
of our psyche? Or are they more minimal and peripheral? After all,
the implicit attitude test was originally developed to test the association
between two ideas. Let us consider, for a moment, an extremely minimal
construal of implicit attitudes suggested by this: an implicit attitude is
simply a tendency to associate one concept with another, in the way that,
for instance, the concept salt might prime the concept pepper. A high IAT
score, on this understanding, means that a person strongly associates, e.g.,
Black faces with handguns. Assuming that this is an exhaustive description
of the implicit attitude – a tendency to associate one concept with another
– can a tendency to associate certain concepts, in and of itself, be morally
problematic?
One way to approach this question is through the lens of rationality.
While it is clear that explicitly racist beliefs are mostly irrational, in
addition to being immoral (e.g., the thought that Black children are less
smart than White children), there seems to be room to argue that some
implicit racial associations are (to a limited extent) rational. Insofar as this
is the case, does that make the attitudes less morally problematic?
To see why someone might argue that implicit attitudes are sometimes
rational, let’s first consider a different case, i.e., gender. IAT results suggest
that most people strongly associate men with science, more so than they
do women with science (see Nosek and Banaji). But if the implicit attitude
really is just an association of concepts, might it be rational to make such
© 2008 The Authors Philosophy Compass 3/3 (2008): 522–540, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00138.x
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias 529
associations? Women, as a matter of fact, are not as well-represented in
the sciences. Indeed, the fact of unequal distribution is an empirical
premise in arguments for affirmative action and other attempts to raise the
number of women in science. With respect to the issue of rationality, our
point is that if implicit attitudes are construed in this very minimal way – as
indicating only that a person associates two concepts – it appears they can
be rational in some sense (e.g., insofar the association between concepts
accurately reflects a correlation or statistical regularity that holds among
those referents of the concepts).
Let us now return to the racial example. Consider the tendency to
associate the faces of young, Black men with handguns. Someone might
analogously suggest that, were it true that young Black men carry guns at
a higher rate than White men, then it would be rational to associate Black
faces with handguns. This is important because, as we mentioned earlier,
it might be thought that rationality and morality go hand-in-hand: insofar
as one’s attitude is rational, it can’t be immoral. For instance, Corlett
writes:
epistemically speaking, one has a duty to eschew error and pursue truth. And
one also has a moral duty to be epistemically responsible (in the dutiful sense).
To the extent that racist beliefs are false representations of self and/or others,
one’s failures to at least earnestly attempt to rid them from one’s belief system
constitutes a failure to live up to one’s epistemic and moral duty. (68)
Here, Corlett ties one’s epistemic and moral duties closely together, leaving
room for the view that only those attitudes stemming from epistemic failures
are immoral.12
We suspect this is not the right way to think about rationality and
implicit attitudes. First, we think that a rational attitude may still be an
immoral one. Rationality and morality are different virtues, so it should be
expected that a person can have the one without the other. For instance,
let us suppose certain evidence (such as test results) suggest that Elisa, a
3rd grader, is not very smart, and let us assume this evidence is strong
enough to justify a teacher’s belief that Elisa is dumb. If this evidence is
enough to justify a teacher’s belief, it will be (in some cases) enough to
justify her parents’ belief that our daughter is dumb.
13 Nevertheless, it would
be unfortunate, and arguably immoral, for Elisa’s parents to be persuaded
by the same degree of evidence that persuades her teachers. Elisa’s parents
have a special relationship with their daughter, one that arguably places
moral constraints on them. In particular, that relationship places moral
constraints on what they ought to believe of their daughter; namely, they
ought to be inclined to believe the best of her. Of course, this is not to
say they should turn a blind eye; if the evidence is very persuasive, they
ought to believe it all things considered. The idea is rather a parent should
give his or her child the benefit of the doubt. Roughly, when multiple
conclusions about his or her children are reasonable, a parent has a moral
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obligation to believe the conclusion that is most kind.14 Our point is that
it can sometimes be unkind or uncompassionate to believe ill of a person,
even if it is rational to do so. Thus it can sometimes be immoral to hold
a belief that is, in fact, rational.
As a second point, suppose we were to grant, for the sake of argument,
the suggestion that rational attitudes are moral and irrational ones are
immoral. Even on this supposition, a case can still be made that implicit
racial biases are morally problematic. We suspect that such associations
(such as those found in studies on the weapon biases) almost always extend
beyond what is rational, and there will almost always be a ‘remainder’: an
implicit association that goes beyond what rationality endorses. If this is
right, then even on the supposition that morality and rationality are
tightly bound together, implicit attitudes will remain morally problematic
to the extent that they outstrip what is rationally justifiable. Thus, the
appeal to rationality would only partially mitigate the moral wrongness of
having implicit racial attitudes.
Instead of focusing on matters of rationality, we think that philosophers
would do well to take a different angle in determining whether and why
implicit racial biases are immoral. We think the meat of the issue is really
two-fold. First, what exactly is the nature of these implicit attitudes?
Implicit racial attitudes raise a number of novel moral issues; getting a grip
on them will require a better understanding of the character of the implicit
attitudes themselves. As we pointed out earlier, they might be construed
as Freudian unconscious states or as very minimal mental associations, and
these options are far from exhaustive. Resolving this question will take
both experimental and conceptual work.
The second question is: why is it that explicitly racist attitudes are
problematic, and can the same story be told about implicit attitudes?15
That is, can current accounts of what makes racist attitudes wrong, accounts
that usually focus on explicit and conscious attitudes, be extended to
cover implicit attitudes as well? In the remainder of this section, we’ll
examine this second question by focusing on the work of two authors:
Garcia’s account of racism and Blum’s account of stereotyping.
Garcia’s analysis of racism stresses the intrinsic features of certain attitudes.
He writes that someone is a racist when they have certain affective and
volitional attitudes:
what makes someone a racist is her disregard for, or even hostility to, those
assigned to the targeted race . . . she is hostile to or cares nothing (or too little) about
some people because of their racial classification . . . hate and callous indifference
(like love) are principally matters of will and desire: what does one want, what
would one choose, for those assigned to this or that race? (43)
Importantly, Garcia construes racism as a deformation of affect and the
will, and this informs his account of why it is morally problematic: racist
attitudes, in themselves, are ‘inherently contrary to the moral virtues of
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Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias 531
benevolence and justice’ (43). Such attitudes, he argues, are hateful and
ill-willed, and are thus opposed to benevolence by their very nature. On
Garcia’s account, the question of whether it is wrong to harbor an implicit
attitude will therefore boil down to whether the attitude is intrinsically
opposed to benevolence, e.g., whether it is an attitude of hate or one
of ill-will.
Determining whether implicit attitudes are intrinsically opposed to
benevolence, however, will require progress on two fronts. First, there are
issues tied to empirical work and how to interpret evidence provided by
indirect tests. Implicit attitudes (or some implicit attitudes) may turn out to
be merely cognitive associations, in which case they would be neither affective
nor volitional. Such attitudes, on Garcia’s account, would not be intrinsically
opposed to benevolence, and so would not be morally problematic.16
Suppose, on the other hand, some implicit attitudes are indeed affectively
laden, as a growing body of empirical research suggests (e.g., Vanman et
al.; Phelps et al.; Amadio, Harmon-Jones, and Devine; see also Payne et
al.). This possibility raises a different kind of difficulty, which turns on
whether such implicit attitudes should be thought of as ‘inherently
contrary to the moral virtue of benevolence’. While it is obvious that
explicit, hate-filled racial rage is intrinsically opposed to benevolence, it
is far less clear whether the more subtle attitudes measured by the IAT
ought to be categorized in this way. One lesson to draw from this is
that it is much easier to apply philosophy’s normative categories (e.g.,
‘intrinsically opposed to benevolence’) to robust, explicit mental states
(e.g., feelings of hostility, what we care about, etc.), than to implicit
ones. As a result, there is real and important philosophical work to be
done in figuring out whether and how these normative categories can
be extended into the realm of implicit attitudes.
Let us turn now to Blum’s account of racial stereotyping. Because he
is mainly concerned with stereotyping, Blum focuses on cognitive rather
than affective mental states. He is careful to distinguish stereotyping from
prejudice: the former is a cognitive distortion (e.g., stereotyping all Asians
as good at math), whereas the later may be affect-laden to various degrees.
In attempting to extend Blum’s view into the realm of implicit bias, we
encounter some of the same problems that beset a straightforward extension
of Garcia’s. For instance, Blum emphasizes that stereotypical content can
be disrespectful: ‘Respect for other persons, an appreciation of others’
humanity and their full individuality is inconsistent with certain kinds
of beliefs about them’ (262). To apply this line of thought to implicit
attitudes, one would need to determine whether, for instance, harboring
a weapon bias is disrespectful or constitutes a failure to appreciate another’s
full humanity. As above, it remains less than clear whether or not this is
the case.
There is another thread in Blum’s account, however, that is more easily
generalized to implicit attitudes. In much of his article, Blum analyzes
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what stereotypes do. Two of the most important features he describes are
that they mask individuality (the stereotyper fails to be sensitive to an
individual’s quirks and characteristics) and that they lead to what he calls
moral distancing. In moral distancing, the stereotyper sees a stereotypee as
more ‘other’ than he or she really is, and this corrodes her sense of a
common, shared humanity. Here, we think Blum’s account can be usefully
and straightforwardly generalized to implicit attitudes. One must simply
ask: do implicit attitudes have these deleterious effects? Do implicit biases
mask individuality and lead to moral distancing? These sound like clear-cut
empirical questions. If implicit racial biases do lead thinkers to fail to
appreciate the individuality of others or to morally distance themselves,
then it follows from Blum’s account that those implicit biases are morally
reprehensible.
In the last few paragraphs, we’ve considered the prospects for extending
two different accounts of racial bias so as to cover implicit racial attitudes.
We hope to have shown that this project, while viable, also poses substantive
philosophical and empirical issues.
As a final note, it seems to us that ethicists working on implicit racism
might be well-served by making a distinction between what is wrong and
what is morally blameworthy. Particularly in the case of implicit attitudes,
it is salient that their acquisition may be rapid, automatic, and uncontrollable.17
These features, it might be thought, are related to features that establish
blameworthiness – such as identification (Frankfurt) or reasons-responsiveness
(Fischer and Ravizza). For instance, it might be said that the implicitly
racist person doesn’t identify with his implicit attitude, or that the attitude
isn’t responsive to reasons; thus we cannot hold a person fully accountable
for those implicit attitudes. If this is right, one might say that such attitudes
are morally wrong – and condemnable – but that the person himself cannot
be blamed for having them. We are reluctant to embrace this solution
wholeheartedly – it may turn out, for instance, that narrow-mindedness
partially explains the acquisition of implicit racism – but such a solution
illustrates how the distinction between moral wrong and moral blame
might be of use in thinking about implicit racism.
might i be racially biased?
One of the remarkable features of implicit bias is the possibility that individuals
may not be aware of their own bias. Neither introspection nor honest
self-report are reliable guides to the presence of such mental states, and
one may harbor implicit biases that are diametrically opposed to one’s
explicitly stated and consciously avowed attitudes. Because of this, thinkers
face a thorny, real-life epistemological problem: given that a large proportion
of the population is implicitly racial biased, is it reasonable to conclude
that I, myself, am racially biased? And if I believe I might be, how should
that belief affect my deliberation and behavior?
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Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias 533
The possibility that you, yourself, may harbor implicit biases has
implications for your concrete beliefs about everyday matters. For instance,
suppose you are a White professor grading a Black student’s paper, and
you are initially inclined to give the paper an 89/100. Does the possibility
of implicit racial bias give you good reason to think the paper actually
deserves slightly better, e.g., 90 or 91 points? Let’s call this example the
savvy grader, since the problem arises when a thinker is psychologically
savvy and is thus aware of the prevalence of implicit racial bias (the
example is discussed in Roedder).
An analogy will be helpful here. Suppose you learn of psychological
research showing that most people are inclined to underestimate the size
of circles when set across a hatched background. Suppose you are later
asked to judge the size of a circle on a hatched background. In deciding
the size of the circle, it is most rational to estimate it to be slightly larger
than you are initially inclined to guess. In doing this, one’s goal is simply
to come up with the most accurate estimate possible, and it seems fairly
obvious that doing so requires correcting for the known visual bias.
With this in mind, let us return to the case of the savvy grader. Assume
for a moment that experiments uncovered a racial bias in the grading of
student papers (if this is too hard to imagine, one might think of some
other decision-making domain, such as the hiring of employees, where
there is more psychological evidence). We maintain that by parity of
reasoning, it would be wise to make a similar adjustment for the implicit
bias in grading, just as you would correct for the visual bias in judging
the size of a circle.18 In both cases, one is acting for purely epistemic reasons;
in order to give the most accurate grade, i.e., in order to grade the paper
based on its merits, it is reasonable for the savvy grader to correct for the
effects of racial biases.19
It is worth pointing out that the reasoning behind the savvy grader case
is very different than that usually offered in justification of affirmative
action, which is mainly driven and justified by moral considerations. In
affirmative action, benefits are given to members of an under-represented
minority, beyond what is warranted strictly by the merits of those individuals,
in the interest of some moral or political aim such as promoting diversity.
Indeed, it is the fact that it calls for benefits over and beyond what an
individual strictly merits that is at the root of much of the resistance to
affirmative action. In contrast, the savvy grader acts on purely epistemic
reasons, and her aim in making an adjustment to the initial grade is to
give the Black student exactly the grade the essay deserves. The situation of
the savvy grader can be thought of as a rational impairment: if you harbor
a racial bias, then you are not responding to reasons in the way that you
ought to, and the most epistemically responsible thing to do is to make
some sort of correction.
There is much more to say here. In particular, we might wonder how
much evidence of implicit racial bias a savvy grader needs before it is
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reasonable for her to adjust how she assigns grades. Roedder argues that
the epistemic requirements are strikingly low: it is enough if she knows
that, ceteris paribus, the bias exists on average. Consider the visual analogy
again. If one were told that, on average, people see the circle as 25% smaller
than it really is, most of us would take that as a reason to increase our
original estimate of its size by 25%. Here, too, the epistemic factors
relevant to grading papers do not appear substantially different from those
of the visual case. If one knows that a slight bias exists on average, the
reasonable response in both cases is to make the appropriate adjustments,
hence for the savvy grader to slightly increase the grades she assigns to
her Black student’s papers. (Indeed, one should be concerned that, insofar
as one is reluctant to compensate for racial bias in grading, this reluctance
might stem from a self-deceptive tendency to believe oneself to be better
than average; see Mele for a lucid and eye opening discussion of the
prevalence of self-deception; Kruger and Dunning for empirical work on
the problems we face assessing our own abilities and competences).
Of course, we don’t yet have evidence that directly bears on the
question of whether or not normal thinkers are implicitly biased against
their Black students when grading papers; to date there has not been a
systematic effort to look for racial bias in essay grading at the college
level. Studies have instead focused on racial bias in hiring, housing, and
other domains.20 But here an interesting wrinkle arises. It might be
argued that one does not need to have direct evidence of implicit biases
influencing judgment in a specific domain in order to be rationally
compelled to make epistemic adjustments for them in that very
domain.21 Rather, it is enough if one believes that, were these studies
run, they would show such a bias. That is, when certain conditions are
met, it is ceteris paribus rational to compensate for bias (and irrational
not to) even in the absence of evidence of their influence. Moreover,
the relevant conditions are fairly lax: you should make corrective adjustments
if, based on the evidence of implicit racial biases in other domains, you
have a hunch that it is more likely than not that such implicit biases also
influence the grading of papers. After all, if you believe it is more likely
than not that grading is somewhat racially biased, how could you justify
continuing to give uncorrected grades?
Thus the important question is this: knowing what you know now
about implicit bias in other domains (perhaps from reading this very
article!), and if you had to place a bet, would you bet that there is a racial
bias in grading or that there isn’t?
22 If you find yourself inclined to think
that (more likely than not) there is a racial bias in grading, and if the line
of reasoning sketched here is correct, then merely having this empirical
hunch is enough to rationally compel you to make some sort of compensatory
adjustment in your Black students’ grades.23 We, the authors, do not yet
know what to make of such an argument – but it strikes us as a surprising
and unexpectedly good one.
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Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias 535
It bears mentioning that we use the case of grading because it hits so
close to home. But the considerations raised here can be generalized along
a number of dimensions, for instance to other contexts (such as resumes,
interviews, police behavior, etc.) as well as to other sorts of implicit biases
(such as gender bias, height bias, etc.). Indeed, we believe there is an even
broader lesson that can be taken away from the discussion. Implicit racial bias
is just one example where psychological science shows our reasoning capacities
to be impaired, and where we have no introspective access to our own impairment.
Whenever this is the case, and wherever thinkers are savvy enough to
learn about the psychology of such biases, similar epistemological challenges
concerning self-assessment and proper adjustment are likely to arise.
4. Conclusion
We had two goals for this paper: to review some of the most compelling
empirical work on implicit racial bias, and to gesture at the sorts of
normative questions it raises. In particular, we have looked at evidence
indicating that implicit racial bias is widespread. There are two major and
converging lines of evidence for this. First, there is laboratory evidence,
primarily gathered with the IAT and similarly indirect measurement
techniques. Second, there are studies that document statistical patterns of
behavior in real-world situations, such as the resume and the NBA studies.
Numerous other studies, which we exemplified with the work on the
‘weapon bias,’ have begun explicitly linking performance on the IAT to
other activities that are likely to be influenced by implicit biases.
Given the character and prevalence of implicit racial bias, a number of
novel normative issues arise. We focused on two of these. First, is implicit
racial bias normatively problematic, and if so, how? Perhaps surprisingly,
no simple answers to either of these questions are obviously correct or
immediately convincing. After separating out moral assessment from issues
centering on rationality, we describe some of the normative work that has
been done on racism and stereotypes, respectively, and we pointed out
where such work can be extended to address implicit racial biases – and
where those extant views seem ill-equipped to deal with them. Second,
ought each person to believe, of himself, that he is racially biased? Does
one have epistemic reason to compensate for implicit racial bias when
making more considered, deliberative judgments? On both of these accounts
we suggested that – again, perhaps surprisingly – there are powerful
arguments indicating that the answer is yes.
Short Biographies
Daniel Kelly’s research is located at the intersection of the philosophy of
mind, psychology and cognitive science. He has authored or co-authored
papers and comments in these areas for Mind and Language, Behavioral and
536 Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias
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Brain Science, The Springer Encyclopedic Reference of Neuroscience, The
Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Psychology and The Oxford
Handbook of Moral Psychology. He is interested in cultural and biological
explanations of our uniquely human cognitive capacities, and in pursuing
ways in which one type of explanation might help enrich the other, and
has been doing work in moral psychology that sheds light on the nature
of moral judgment and cross cultural diversity. He is currently an assistant
professor at Purdue University, where he is working on a book on the
philosophy and psychology of disgust.
Erica Roedder’s research focuses on the philosophical implications of
modern psychological research. She has several forthcoming papers on
topics at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, and she participates
in the Moral Psychology Research Group, a group of philosophers and
psychologists who collaborate on interdisciplinary topics. Her present
research examines whether and how thinkers who know about psychological biases might use this knowledge to correct their own biases, as well
as the ethical and epistemological significance of such self-correction. Some
of this research is summarized in the last third of this article. Erica Roedder
received her B.A. with honors in Philosophy from Stanford University,
and she will receive her Ph.D. from New York University in Summer
2008. Subsequently she will be a Visiting Professor at the Parr Center for
Ethics, located at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Department of Philosophy, Purdue University, 100 N. University
St. West, Lafayette, IN, 47906, USA. Email: drkelly@purdue.edu.
† Correspondence address: Department of Philosophy, Caldwell Hall, UNC/Chapel Hill,
Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA. Email: eroedder@gmail.com.
1
Throughout, we will simplify the discussion by considering just two groups, and using the
capitalized terms ‘Black’ and ‘White’ to refer those putative racial groups and their members.
Other terminology, e.g., ‘African-American’, is less suitable for our purposes because it is overly
restrictive. For example, it does not appear that implicit racial biases against Blacks apply only
to Black Americans, or only to Americans of specifically African descent. 2
See Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz for the first presentation of the IAT itself, as well as
the initial results obtained with it. Also see Greenwald and Nosek; Lane et al.; Nosek, Greenwald,
and Banaji, ‘Implicit Association Test’ for more recent reviews of data gathered using IATs, and
for useful discussions of the methodological issues surrounding the test. 3
For a more detailed and technically precise description of how the IAT works, see any of the
papers cited in endnote 2. At the outset of their extensive survey of research based on the IAT
(over 4.5 million tests have been taken on the Harvard Web site alone!), Lane et al. provide a
more concise characterization:
The IAT measures the relative strength of association between pairs of concepts, labeled for
pedagogic purposes as category and attribute. When completing an IAT, participants rapidly
classify individual stimuli that represent category and attribute (in the form of words, symbols,
or pictures) into one of four distinct categories with only two responses. The underlying
assumption is that responses will be facilitated – and thus will be faster and more accurate –
when categories that are closely associated share a response, as compared to when they do
not. (62)
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Racial Cognition and the Ethics of Implicit Bias 537
In order to get the feel of the test, however, one is much better off simply taking one; different
versions of it are available at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/selectatest.html. 4
More precisely: ‘the logic of the IAT is that this sorting task should be easier when the two
concepts that share a response are strongly associated than when they are weakly associated’
(Nosek, Greenwald, and Banaji, ‘Implicit Association Test’ 267). 5
The very first study using the IAT found evidence of implicit racial biases in White American
undergraduates (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz). Since that initial paper, similar results have
been found with disturbing frequency (Banaji; Ottaway, Hayden, and Oakes; see also Lane et al.). 6
Similar dissociations have been found using a wide variety of other indirect measures, including
evaluative priming (Cunningham, Preacher, and Banaji; Devine et al.), the startle eyeblink test
(Phelps et al.; Amodio, Harmon-Jones, and Devine), and EMG measures (Vanman et al.). 7
There is a growing literature on these issues. In particular, see Greenwald et al. for an
overview of similar studies connecting implicit biases with behavior and judgment; also see
Nosek, Greenwald, and Banaji, ‘Implicit Association Test’; Lane et al.; Kang and Banaji for
discussion of the significance of such findings.
8
We know of no efforts to answer this question, although it is posed in Jolls and Sunstein. 9
In stating these examples, we felt extremely uncomfortable, and we anticipate that our readers
will feel the same way. However, we think concrete examples are needed in order to make
salient our point: in general, explicitly racist attitudes – even if they are not acted upon – are
morally damnable.
10 A nice discussion of non-voluntary attitudes, and how we can be responsible for them, can
be found in Smith.
11 Both authors focus on mental states that are quite different from the implicit attitudes
measured by the IAT. We discuss their views in more depth below.
12 We say he is ‘leaving room’ because it is not clear whether Cortlett endorses such a view or
not. He is certainly saying that we sometimes have a moral duty to be rational, and that our
attitudes can be morally wrong if they spring from irrational tendencies. But it is not clear if,
on his view, epistemic dutifulness exhausts our moral duties with respect to our attitudes
themselves. Perhaps he thinks that, in addition, we have moral duties to have benevolent or
respectful attitudes, as suggested by Garcia and Blum, respectively. 13 Arguably, Elisa’s parents have much more evidence than her teacher does, so the epistemic
conditions of the teacher and parent are different. That’s okay; we need only the point that
sometimes evidence that is rationally persuasive for a teacher might also be rationally persuasive
for the parent.
14 In making this argument, our example assumes that one’s evidence and background beliefs
can sometimes support multiple rational conclusions. This makes it easier to stomach the
thought that one might be morally compelled not to form a belief that would be rationally
justified. After all, if there are multiple rational conclusions available, one can follow the moral
compulsion not to form rational belief P, and instead form belief Q, where Q is also rational. But
at least one of us (ER) thinks this can be taken one step further: moral considerations can
sometimes compel us to believe things that are not rational. Considering the case of race, it
seems intuitive that, even if it were rational to believe Black children were dumber than White
children, it would still be morally repugnant to do so. 15 Of course, authors writing on racism have discussed unconscious racism, including Blum and
Garcia. Garcia states explicitly that one’s racism might be unconscious, e.g., you may not know
why you don’t take the elevator (43). Blum suggests that stereotyping may occur at a level
below that of belief, e.g., when a woman unconsciously grabs her purse as a Black man passes
by (266). But neither of these authors go into depth about unconscious attitudes, which leaves
open the question of whether their accounts really generalize to unconscious or implicit
attitudes in any straightforward way.
16 At least, they would not be morally problematic in the way that racist attitudes are problematic.
Garcia offers an account of racism, not a complete moral theory. 17 See Gregg, Seibt, and Banaji. We have stated that it is more salient that implicit attitudes are
uncontrollable. That’s because, arguably, the acquisition of most explicit attitudes is uncontrollable
as well; it’s just not salient at first glance. One does not control one’s acquisition of, for instance,
one’s beliefs about plants, one’s attitudes towards pets, etc. So one will need to appeal to more
complex or carefully delineated features – perhaps identification or reasons-responsiveness – if
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one wants to claim that implicit attitudes are not proper subjects of blame, but that explicit
attitudes are.
18 There are, of course, many ways one might go about compensating for implicit racial bias.
Most obviously, one might use conscious rules, e.g., ‘Bump up borderline grades of Black students’.
In addition, there are various psychological techniques which seem to mitigate implicit racial
bias, such as entertaining counterstereotypic thoughts (e.g., imagining a positive Black role model,
or a female scientist).
19 People sometimes question the idea that grades are apt to be ‘accurate’ at all. In many ways,
this is irrelevant – most of us want to avoid having the race of a student affect their grading.
That desire is enough to motivate the problems we raise here: if one has this desire, it seems
that one is rationally compelled to correct for possible influence of race in deliberation. 20 In an extensive search of two databases (PsychInfo and ERIC), and after consulting with
several psychologists and one education researcher, we were able to locate only three small
studies after the 1970s dealing directly with racial bias in the assessment of college level work
(Ballantyne and Sparks; Dorsey and Colliver; Amodio). Of these, the most suggestive is Amodio,
which asked subjects to evaluate a fellow student on the basis of ‘his’ essay (in truth, all essays
were identical). Subjects were given demographic data about the essay’s purported author and
asked whether they thought the author of the essay was unintelligent, lazy, or had other
stereotypical features. Amodio found that IAT scores predicated a racial bias in responding to
these questions; students with high IAT scores were more likely to think that, if they were told
the author was Black, he was unintelligent, lazy, etc.
21 This point does not mitigate the importance of running such studies. In the absence of
evidence, we argue, it is rational to act guided by your best-informed hunches as to how the
studies would turn out. But this is a stop-gap measure, to be used until one can correct for the
absence of evidence.
22 To add to the case we are making, one can appeal to expert opinion. In that vein, we have
discussed this issue with two members of Banaji’s lab at Harvard, both of whom said they’d be
‘very surprised’ if there wasn’t implicit racial bias in the domain of grading. 23 This version of epistemic argument is highly compressed, thus there isn’t room to respond
to a number of important objections. Roedder contains a much fuller exploration and defense
of these claims.
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