Beyond Awareness: The Many Forms of Implicit Bias and Its Implications

Abstract

In 1969, in his address to the American Psychological Association, George Miller implored the field of psychology to give its science away. For their part, the general public has shown itself to have a thirst for those ideas that might be useful to solving some of our most intractable social problems. Implicit bias is one of those good ideas that has transcended the laboratory, in part because of the positive efforts of Project Implicit (https://implicit.harvard.edu). For example, during her failed election campaign in 2016, Hilary Clinton declared, “We all have implicit biases” (Merica, 2016). The world is looking to our field to better understand if implicit bias is a dangerous and prevalent pathogen or a mildly annoying but mostly benign curiosity. It hasn’t helped that within the ivory tower, there is no clear consensus on how to best define the construct (Corneille & H€ utter, 2020). Into this context, Gawronski, Ledgerwood, and Eastwick (this issue; GLE) introduce their target article. In the title of their article, GLE make a simple plea to scholars in the field: Whatever it is that implicit measures of stereotypes and attitudes capture, we should not label this implicit bias (IB). We completely agree with this conclusion and would like to happily sign our names to the petition to refrain from this usage moving forward (just as we would similarly agree that a measure of any construct and the construct itself are not one in the same). In fact, we made a similar argument in a recent publication stating, “too often the terms ‘implicit associations’ (the strength of the associations between concepts in the mind, measured indirectly by the IAT) and ‘implicit bias’ (disparate treatment that can result from one’s implicit associations with social groups) are used isomorphically (cf. De Houwer, 2019)” (see Pitfall #3 of Schmader, Dennehy, & Baron, 2022). In that article, two of us argued for having greater conceptual clarity over what IB is and outlined different pathways by which bias unfolds, so that interventionists designing tools to mitigate the harms from bias have an effective playbook to work from. In this commentary, we focus our analysis on GLE’s general definition that IB “captures the idea that people may behave in a biased way without being aware that their behavior is biased” (Gawronski et al., this issue, p. 139). We agree with GLE’s focus on bias as behavior, not on the individual differences assessed with implicit measures. We suggest, however, that this particular definition of IB must go further to clarify the precise role of awareness in the delineation of IB. We argue that any clear conceptualization of bias needs to recognize the process by which stereotypes and attitudes in mind can lead to biased behavior that does harm to others. Drawing from and extending a recently published bias typology (Schmader et al., 2022), we will see that awareness is only one component needed to distinguish implicit from explicit (or intentional) bias, and that even within these categories, bias can take different forms where people can be aware of some parts of the process but not of others. Thus, in contrast to GLE’s assertion that the definition of IB is quite clear, we believe there are remaining ambiguities that require greater focus.