Implicit Bias and the Lgbtqi+ Community

• Publication year: 2023
• Author: LAURA CHIYONO ROSENTHAL, ESQ.

Implicit Bias and the LGBTQI+ Community

LAURA CHIYONO ROSENTHAL, ESQ.

SANTA ROSA, CALIFORNIA

Note: This article is based on an August 6, 2022, webinar presentation by Laura Chiyono Rosenthal and Nancy Hill, sponsored by the Workers' Compensation Section of the CLA.

Bias is prejudice: a preconceived judgment or opinion. Bias against an individual person or a group of people can be implicit (implied) or explicit (fully expressed). It can arise from a number of factors, including our personal backgrounds, attitudes and experiences. Learning the sources of negative bias is important to interrupting and correcting related discriminatory behavior.

One source of bias is stereotypes, which are oversimplified, generalized ideas about a particular group of people based on untested assumptions or inferences, without objective evidence to support them. (See Cox, Xie and Devine, Untested assumptions perpetuate stereotyping: Learning in the absence of evidence (2022) Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 102, p. 2.) Common stereotypes include those applied to racial groups ("All Asians are good at math"), political groups ("All Democrats are left-wing liberals"), religious groups ("All Jews are high achievers and rich") and occupations ("All lawyers are greedy").

Stereotyping and biases result when people's brains bypass the complete processing of information. (Popova, The antidote to prejudice: Walter Lippmann on overriding the mind's propensity for preconceptions (2019) Brain Pickings.) Individuals may rely on stereotypes when they find complicated or ambiguous situations time consuming and difficult to navigate. Therefore, such people may make rushed evaluations based on limited information. (See Rothbart, From individual to group impressions: Availability heuristics in stereotype formation (1978) Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 14, Issue 3, 237-255.)

Implicit bias is an automatic assumption about an individual or a group. All of us have implicit biases, and many of us have been perceived stereotypically. Such bias occurs because of the way our brains take in information. The human brain, like a computer, operates on information it receives and processes. Scientific research shows that the brain takes in about 11 million bits of information every second but can consciously process only about 50 bits a second. Therefore, most of the information the human brain takes in is processed unconsciously. (See Agarwal, Sway: Unraveling Unconscious Bias (2020) Bloomsbury Sigma.)

"However, what happens if you do not consciously consider certain information or messages that repeatedly come into your brain?"

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow ((2011) Farrar, Straus and Giroux), describes this two-system way of thinking. System 1 thinking is fast, automatic and basically unconscious—for example, your response to someone asking you for an answer to a simple math problem, such as, "What is two plus two?" Your brain provides the answer before you have given the question conscious consideration. However, according to Kahneman, System 2 thinking applies if the question is, for example, "What is the square root of 126?" You would probably need to slow down and consciously work out that answer.

Much of the...