Explicit and Implicit Prejudice
Again and again, we have seen that our brain processes thoughts, memories, and attitudes on two different tracks. Sometimes that processing is explicit—on the radar screen of our awareness. More often, it is implicit—an unthinking knee-jerk response operating below the radar, leaving us unaware of how our attitudes are influencing our behavior. In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court, in upholding the Fair Housing Act, recognized implicit bias research, noting that “unconscious prejudices” can cause discrimination even when people do not consciously intend to discriminate.
“ We’re also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal.”
President Barack Obama, funeral for Clementa Pinkney, 2015
Psychologists study implicit prejudice by
- Testing for unconscious group associations: Tests in which people quickly pair a person’s image with a trait demonstrate that even people who deny any racial prejudice may harbor negative associations (Banaji & Greenwald, 2013). Millions of people have taken the Implicit Association Test (at Implicit.Harvard.edu). Although the test is useful for studying automatic prejudice, critics question its reliability and caution against using it to assess or label individuals (Oswald et al., 2013, 2015). Defenders counter that implicit biases predict behaviors ranging from simple acts of friendliness to the evaluation of work quality (Greenwald et al., 2015).
- Considering unconscious patronization: In one experiment, White university women assessed flawed student essays they believed had been written by either a White or a Black student. The women gave low evaluations, often with harsh comments, to the essays supposedly written by a White student. When the same essay was attributed to a Black student, their assessment was more positive (Harber, 1998). Did the evaluators calibrate their evaluations to their racial stereotypes, leading to less exacting standards and a patronizing attitude? In real-world evaluations, such low expectations and the resulting “inflated praise and insufficient criticism” could hinder minority student achievement, the researcher noted.
- Monitoring reflexive bodily responses: Even people who consciously express little prejudice may give off telltale signals as their body responds selectively to an image of a person from another ethnic group. Neuroscientists can detect signals of implicit prejudice in the viewer’s facial-muscle responses and in the activation of the emotion-processing amygdala (Cunningham et al., 2004; Eberhardt, 2005; Stanley et al., 2008).
Homegrown terrorism In the 16 years following the terror of September 11, 2001, many Americans feared attacks from foreign terrorists. Yet since that time, attacks by homegrown White supremacists and other non-Muslim extremists were nearly twice as likely (Shane, 2015)—as when a neo-Nazi slaughtered six people in a 2012 shooting at a Wisconsin Sikh temple.