Check Your (Implicit) Bias!

With all that is unfolding in the world regarding the recent death of George Floyd, many are asking “what can I do?” But what CAN one do given the many restrictions we must observe due to the COVID-19 pandemic? The answer: A LOT! Perhaps one of the most important things we can do is to increase our insight and open our minds to better understand where racism (and other “-isms”) come from. The first step to changing discrimination in our society is to identify where it hides in each of our minds.

Enter the concept of implicit bias. As the name indicates, “implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner” (Kirwan Institute at OSU). All people have implicit biases. It is thought that implicit biases are formed throughout one’s social development due to biased messages that are communicated in society about different groups of people. Implicit biases often run counter to our stated beliefs and frequently change our behavior! How interesting (if not a bit scary) to discover that our behavior isn’t solely influenced by things we are aware of. The beautiful thing here is that once you have become aware of (and accepted) this influence in your life, you can start to build systems that prevent it from being enacted around you.

It is easy to think “I have lots of _____(insert racial or ethnic minority group) friends that I love - I don’t see color” or “I’ve done a sensitivity training at work, so I don’t have biases anymore”. However, you might be surprised to find just how biased your implicit social cognition continues to be. This is where our social psychology friends come to the rescue. In fact, social psychologists have developed a very sensitive test called the Implicit Attitudes Test (or IAT for short) that can measure the degree of your implicit bias on a variety of dimensions including weight, sexual orientation, gender identity, and, of course, race (among many others). If you want to learn more about your implicit biases, take 15 minutes and check out Project Implicit which is a Harvard-run site that allows you to take many different IATs. This is an interesting way to, in some ways, make the unconscious conscious. If each of us can take steps to become more aware of the biased forces within us AND share this new insight with one other person, it could do a great deal to erode the foundation of discrimination in our society today. With this new found awareness, we could take steps to eradicate biased messages in our society and lay the foundation for a future generation of less biased minds.