Everyone Has Unconscious Bias
By: Elle Beau
Tags: Racism, This Happened To Me, Society, Bias, Equality

What happened when I took an Implicit Associations Test

Photo by jurien huggins on Unsplash

When I took the Implicit Associations Test (IAT) designed by researchers at Harvard University today, I wasn’t particularly surprised by the results, although they did not come out how I would prefer to think of myself. I only took two tests, one for racial preference and one for associations by gender. They also offer tests that reflect implicit associations related to age, weight, disability, sexuality, and other topics. I may go back to the website at some point and take those as well.

My results for the gender associations test showed a strong automatic association of males with career and with females for family, despite the fact that I am a staunch supporter of female empowerment and opportunity. This didn’t particularly surprise me, however, because I’m 56 years old and grew up in a very traditional family where even though my mother worked part time some of my childhood, my dad was clearly the breadwinner and she was clearly the primary manager of the childrearing and homemaking aspects. My conscious beliefs that I speak and write about now are only a part of the picture. What’s deep in my less conscious places reflect my upbringing and the strong gender binaries of the society that I was raised in.

When I took the racial preference test, I showed a strong automatic preference for European Americans over African Americans. This too didn’t surprise me, although I was less sanguine about the results than that of the gender associations test. I care deeply about equality and racism, and I would much prefer to think of myself as progressive and egalitarian. And I am in my conscious thinking. But that’s not the whole story, which is the point of the tests.

Even though I spent my elementary school years in Hawaii, a place where whites are the minority, and I do have some non-white friends (although not many), I’m well aware that we live in a deeply racist society. It seems unlikely that as much as I want to transcend that and not be a part of contributing to that dynamic, because it’s the ocean I’ve been swimming in my whole life, I am steeped in the implicit biases learned from my culture. I can accept that, even if I wish it weren’t so.

According to the researchers who run the IAT project the reason that we should seek to understand unconscious bias is that “Implicit preferences can predict behavior. Implicit preferences are related to discrimination in hiring and promotion, medical treatment, and decisions related to criminal justice.” They go on to say that such biases are very difficult to change, in part because we are largely unaware of them, but even things like implicit bias training do not necessarily make a substantive impact.

Unconscious bias, otherwise known as implicit bias, is something that we all have — everyone, regardless of race or gender. It does not only have to do with race or ethnicity, but are simply stereotypes that we hold largely without even realizing them about any social group. Other places of potential unconscious bias may be around age, gender, gender identity, physical abilities, religion, sexual orientation, weight, etc. This desire to lump people together in a defineable block comes not necessarily from malice, but from a human desire to organize social worlds by category. None-the-less, because most forms of discrimination are implicit and not overt, this type of unconscious bias has a very detrimental effect on our society.