Implicit bias

What is implicit bias?

Implicit bias concerns evaluative associations or stereotypes assessed without relying only on a person’s direct report of their beliefs. It is part of the research tradition of implicit social cognition (Greenwald and Banaji, 1995). Indirect measurement does not automatically establish that a person is completely unaware of an association or that it causes a particular action.

The Implicit Association Test and behavior

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) compares response speeds when people pair categories with attributes, such as pleasant and unpleasant words. Association tasks, including those offered by Project Implicit, examine relative responses to concepts. A task score is not a diagnosis of an individual’s character.

Forscher and colleagues (2019) synthesized experiments intended to change implicit measures. Changes in those measures generally did not translate into corresponding changes in behavior. Much of the evidence involved brief interventions.

Examples in hiring and bias training

A hiring experiment that changes names can test differential treatment associated with those names. It cannot alone establish whether the mechanism was conscious or unconscious. Similarly, neither an association score nor a short training result proves that discrimination has been eliminated. For hiring, define the job requirements and examine how decisions are made. For bias training, ask whether decisions and outcomes improve, not just whether a score moves immediately after the session. Good intentions do not establish fair treatment, and a changed test score does not establish changed behavior.