How Biased Are We, Really?

• Author: Singal, Jesse
• Position: BOOKS - Jennifer L. Eberhardt's "Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do" - Book review

FAMOUS SONG FROM Avenue Q, the celebrated Broadway puppet musical, nicely sums up what we've been told about racism for the last two decades or so: "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist."

This notion, which escaped from the confines of academic social psychology and other fields in the 1990s, has dominated the national debate about racism ever since. When it comes to psychology's treatment of the subject, that's largely because of the runaway popularity of the implicit association test (IAT), a computerized quiz that supposedly reveals your level of unconscious bias against marginalized groups. It also reflects a broader infatuation with "social priming" research, which is centered on the idea that human behavior can be powerfully influenced by subtle cues, even ones we aren't consciously aware that our mind has processed.

Social priming hit its stride at John Bargh's New York University lab in the late 1990s (he's now at Yale), while the IAT was introduced in 1998 by Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington and Mahzarin Banaji, presently the chair of Harvard's psychology department. The early years of the 21st century were very good for both: Social-priming researchers published some sexy, surprising findings, and the IAT quickly established itself as the way for sophisticated people to talk about race in America.

Implicit bias tells a compelling and straightforward story about why racially discriminatory outcomes in America persist: Many people think they're racial egalitarians, but deep down they're not. And their implicit bias manifests itself in countless ways, helping to reinforce America's racial hierarchy by infecting everything from police conduct to real estate agents' treatment of potential homeowners.

There is ample empirical evidence that implicit bias exists. Plus, you would expect it to exist, theoretically speaking--the human brain evolved to filter out the universe's cacophony of information by quickly and often sloppily carving things up into categories, and it often then jumps to conclusions based on those categories. But there are many unanswered questions about what percentage of the discriminatory-outcome "pie" can be attributed to implicit bias. Many of the other potential culprits--ossified segregation patterns in housing and schooling, for example--can be explained entirely (or almost entirely) without any reference to implicit bias.

Making things even more complicated, the study of implicit bias has hit some...