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On the epistemic costs of implicit bias

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Notes

  1. In his Foreword, CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence Douglas MacEachin notes: “I know from first-hand encounters that many CIA officers tend to react skeptically to treatises on analytic epistemology. This is understandable.” (Heuer 1999) I know likewise from first-hand encounters that many analytic epistemologists tend to react skeptically to CIA treatises on intelligence analysis (cf. Gendler and Hawthorne 2005; as well as responses to von Fintel and Gillies 2008). While this too is understandable, it would be misplaced in this particular case.

  2. As Heuer notes, the case is a terminological variant (due to Frank J. Stech) of Kahneman and Tversky’s (1972) classic green taxicab (85%)/blue taxicab (15%) case.; cf. also (Kahneman and Tversky 1973).

  3. Though human beings are notoriously bad at making use of explicitly-presented probabilistic base rate information (like the 85:15 information in the airplanes case), we are actually very good at making use of base rate information that is acquired through implicit learning or presented to us in terms of frequencies rather than probabilities. (Indeed, this fact will play a role in the next example.) For detailed discussion of and evidence for this claim, see Koehler (1996). (Thanks to David Hilbert for emphasizing the need to include reference to this body of work, and for pointing out the internal tensions in earlier drafts of the paper that resulted from my not having done so explicitly.).

  4. Readers who enjoyed this brief excursion into CIA publications and who are looking to while (not “wile”; Zwicky 2008) away a few spare hours might enjoy playing some of the Agency’s games for children at https://www.cia.gov/kids-page/games/index.htm. (Central Intelligence Agency 2010) (Readers wondering how I while away mine are invited to follow this paper’s footnotes for a guided tour.)

  5. Actually, in the original quotation, Franklin writes: “It was during our stroll through the club that a white woman called me out, presented me with her coat check, and ordered me to bring her coat” (italics added). I have omitted the crucial term because including it renders race so salient that it would provide an alternative explanation for the response, diluting the force of my tu quoque. (Thanks to Keith DeRose for pointing this out.).

  6. Indeed, as far as I can tell, of the seven authors listed in the first substantive paragraph of the Digital History site’s “succinct essay on the best books on the history of slavery,” none is of African descent. (Digital History n.d.) So if this was your (tacit) reasoning process, you should be credited not with accurate base-rate encoding, but—more likely—with employing what psychologists call the “representativeness heuristic.” (Thanks to Steve Darwall for reminding me that most books on African-American slavery are in fact by non-black authors.)

  7. In case you are fortunate enough not to know the joke, here’s a version from Wikiquote, with George Bernard Shaw (“GBS”) in the leading role. GBS: “Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?” Actress: “My goodness, Well, I'd certainly think about it.” GBS: “Would you sleep with me for a pound?” Actress: “Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!” GBS: “Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling about the price.” (“George Bernard Shaw” 2011).

  8. I am thus trying to cash out in more detail some remarks I made in the closing pages of Gendler (2008b), where I remarked: “[L]iving in a society that violates ones normative ideals has unavoidable cognitive consequences. For either you will need to deliberately restrict your attention or experiences so as not to encode certain sorts of genuine regularities (for example, by deliberately preventing yourself from acquiring and attending to the fact that, in contemporary American society, certain racial categories are associated with certain sorts of highly-valenced affective content.) Or you will need to engage in alief-driven rationalization, changing your normative ideals to accord with the relevant sorts of experienced regularity (for example, by coming to endorse the legitimacy of these stereotypical associations.) Or you will experience the cognitive costs of disharmony, redeploying cognitive energy to suppress the pull of your belief-discordant aliefs (for example, by expending executive control in cases of interracial interaction to suppress your aliefs, thereby temporarily depleting your cognitive resources.) This is the trichotomy of norm-discordant alief.” (Gendler 2008b, p. 578).

  9. Matters here are actually quite complicated, and those familiar with the relevant psychological literature will be aware that I am skating over a large number of important distinctions, both in the base rate literature itself (again, see Kohler 1996 for a review) as well as more specific work on the relation between stereotypes and base-rate neglect (e.g., Locksley et al. 1980; Kunda and Spencer 2003.) Since the goal of this (already overlong) paper is just to explore one aspect of this incredibly complex and multifaceted phenomenon, I beg forgiveness for neglecting these important subtleties.

  10. An important bibliographic caveat. In my discussion below, I will make reference to a wide range of empirical literature in psychology, but almost none to the tremendously important work in philosophy that has addressed these questions. It should be obvious to those familiar with those works that I have been influenced profoundly in my thinking by books such as (Alcoff 2006; Anderson 2010; Appiah and Gutman 1996; Blum 2002; Mills 1997; Shelby 2005; Sullivan 2006; as well as numerous articles by these and other authors.)

  11. In this paper, I focus largely on racial categories in late 20th and early 21st century America. But the basic psychological mechanisms that underlie the general points I am making appear to be universal. See, for example, Hodson et al. (2005) (a study of aversive racism outside the US); Sangrigoli et al. (2005) (a study of cross-race face identification in Europe); Tanaka et al. 2004 (a cross-cultural study of cross-race face identification); and Dunham et al. (2006) (a study exploring implicit bias in America and Japan).

  12. I had originally hoped to include a final section describing promising strategies for overcoming some of the phenomena discussed in this paper, but the essay is already far over its allotted length. I hope to explore these issues in a subsequent paper (especially since eliminating that section required me to leave out some of the paper’s best jokes.) For a philosophically informed overview of some of this literature, see Kelly and Roedder (2008) and Kelly et al. (2010).

  13. Thanks to Matthew Noah Smith for encouraging me to be explicit about this point from the outset.

  14. For related psychological discussion see (Hamilton and Troiler 1986; Taylor 1981; Medin 1988; Oakes and Turner 1990; Schneider 2004).

  15. For interesting related work see (Huebner 2009).

  16. Cf. also the overview in Hamilton and Sherman (1994) and Devine (2009).

  17. The contemporary term stereotype was coined by Lippmann in (1922). He writes: “For the most part we do not first see, and then define; we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture." (Lippmann 1922, p. 81). In keeping with the dual themes of the opening section of this essay, it’s worth noting that Lippmann is also the person who introduced the term Cold War into popular discourse (Lippmann 1947), following its use in the context of US-Soviet relations by Bernard Baruch, an advisor to Harry Truman, in speech before Congress on April 14, 1947. (Baruch 1947).

  18. The entry continues: “Functionally, they may be regarded as mental helpers that operate in the form of heuristics or short-cuts. Historically, this view of stereotypes as devices that allow a sensible reading of a complex world marked a breakthrough in research on stereotypes. Advanced by Allport (1954) and Tajfel (1969), the idea that stereotypes were inherent to the act of social categorization now forms the basis of the modern view. As such, stereotypes are regarded to be ordinary in nature, in the sense that they are the byproducts of basic processes of perception and categorization, learning, and memory. This cognitive view of stereotypes has dominated the field since the early 1980s” (Banaji 2002).

  19. In the seminal study exploring this effect, Tajfel and Wilkes (1963) asked participants to estimate category exemplars (lines) that varied continuously along a physical dimension (length). Participants provided their estimates in one of three conditions: Longer lines were systematically given a different label from shorter lines (with an arbitrary point along the continuum selected for the division), each line was randomly given one of the two labels, or no labels were presented. As predicted, the systematic association of categorical labels with exemplars that varied along a physical continuum increased the perceived differences between exemplars from different categories: Participants perceived a greater difference between the shortest of the long lines and the longest of the short lines in the systematic-categorization condition than they did in the other two conditions (thereby providing support for Tajfel and Wilkes’ hypothesis that some aspects of stereotyping have their origins in cognitive-perceptual processes that lead to an exaggeration of perceived differences between members of different social groups). In subsequent research in this tradition, Tajfel and others have demonstrated this effect in a wide range of domains (cf. Tajfel 1959; see also Ford and Stangor 1992; Krueger and Clement 1994; Macrae et al. 1993; Macrae et al. 1994; Stangor 2009; Tajfel 1981; Tajfel and Wilkes 1963).

  20. Cf. Patricia Devine: “[D]uring socialization, a culture’s beliefs about various social groups are frequently activated and become well-learned. As a result, these deep-rooted stereotypes and evaluative biases are automatically activated, without conscious awareness or intention, in the presence of members of stereotyped groups (or their symbolic equivalent)” (Devine and Sharp 2009, p. 62; cf. Devine 1989).

  21. Thanks to George Bealer for encouraging me to include more detail on this issue.

  22. I present the skywalk case making use of a strict characterization of alief, according to which the alief’s content is a representational-affective-behavioral triad. But the term fits more easily into ordinary talk if it is given a propositional complement. When the associative chain is widely shared, little information is lost thereby. So I might say, speaking loosely: I believe that the walkway is solid but alieve that it is precarious.

  23. Literally on the day that this paper was going to press, New York Times reporter Edward Rothstein (author of the Grand Canyon Skywalk article cited at the beginning of “Alief and Belief”) published a piece about Chicago’s Skydeck Ledge, a transparent glass box suspended on the side of the 103-story Willis Tower, some 1,353 feet above the city’s busy streets. In perfect keeping with the alief-belief theme, Rothstein reports: “Despite the reassuring rivets in the 1,500-pound glass panels, the calm stillness of the air at the Windy City’s pinnacle and the security of a 10,000-pound weight capacity for each of the four 4.3-foot-deep glass boxes that protrude past the sheer edge of the Western Hemisphere’s tallest building—despite all that, you still feel twinges of queasiness…It is comforting to know that they were designed by the building’s original architects, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and mounted on tracks that allow them to be pulled inside for cleaning and maintenance. But any reassurance is undercut by the elimination of nearly all visible support; you walk within them, 1,353 feet above South Wacker Drive, surrounded by open air and unbounded space.” (The article continues with some interesting observations about why the effect of the Ledge is more powerful than that of the Canyon Skywalk; see Rothstein (2011)).

  24. For discussion of a wide range of such cases, see Gendler (2008a, b).

  25. Another domain where alief-belief discordance may be valuable is in the horror that most humans confront in undertaking necessary violence. Even if a person believes it is necessary to harm or kill for the greater good, we think they have lost something fundamental to their humanity if they lose or suppress the ‘killing-is-bad’ alief. (Thanks to Brendan Dill for discussion here.)

  26. Devine and Elliott (1995); for 21st century discussion, see Amodio and Devine (2006).

  27. As Patricia Devine writes: “during socialization, a culture’s beliefs about various social groups are frequently activated and become well-learned. As a result, these deep-rooted stereotypes and evaluative biases are automatically activated, without conscious awareness or intention, in the presence of members of stereotyped groups (or their symbolic equivalent)” (Devine 2009, p. 62; cf. Devine 1989).

  28. Nor is this tension a new one. In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal wrote of “the ever-raging conflict between, on the one hand, the valuations preserved on the general plane which we call the ‘American creed,’ where the American thinks, talks, and acts under the influence of high national and Christian precepts and, on the other hand, the valuations on the specific planes of individual and group living, where personal and local interests; economic, social, and sexual jealousies; consideration of community prestige and conformity; group prejudice against particular persons or types of people; and all sorts of miscellaneous wants, impulses, and habits dominate his outlook. (Myrdal 1944, p. xliii, as cited in Gaertner and Dovidio 2000).

  29. Cf. also Devine and Elliot: “The coexistence of a rejected yet enduring negative stereotype of Blacks and a positive set of beliefs about Blacks places the low-prejudiced social perceiver in a precarious position. A considerable amount of research indicates that stereotypes can be automatically activated by the perception of social stimuli (e.g. exemplars of the group, group labels), resulting in prejudice-like feelings, thoughts and behaviors for high- and low-prejudiced individuals alike (Devine 1989; Klinger and Beall 1992).” (Devine and Elliott 1995, p. 1147).

  30. Similar patterns were observed in a 1986 meta-analysis of 128 eyewitness identification and facial recognition studies, involving 960 experimental conditions and 16,950 participants (Shapiro and Penrod 1986).

  31. This is an important caveat, and one that brings out the ways in which I am ignoring in my discussions a large and important literature on racial categorization itself.

  32. Cf. (Kelly et al. 2007; also Bar-Haim et al. 2006; for an overview of this literature, see Hehman et al. 2010).

  33. Cf. (Bernstein et al. 2007; Sporer 2001; Hehman et al. 2010, p. 445).

  34. To my knowledge, there have been no empirical studies in this paradigm looking at black responses to white faces. One might expect parallel results (mutatis mutandis). Or one might expect that because white identity is encoded as the unmarked case in the dominant culture, the effect would be less pronounced.

  35. Thanks to Christopher Peacocke for the suggestion that prompted this analogy.

  36. Thanks to Brendan Dill for pointing out the importance of making this distinction, and for suggesting the second formulation.

  37. For an interesting discussion of the interaction of race and class in CR deficit, see Shriver et al. (2008).

  38. For an accessible overview of recent work in this area, see Stroessner et al. (n.d.). A highly readable introduction to the phenomenon by the person who coined the term is Steele (2010).

  39. The magnitude of these effects can be quite powerful: in some cases, participants in stereotype threat conditions answer only half as many questions correctly as those in non-threat conditions (Steele and Aronson 1995).

  40. Interestingly, the effect seems to be most profound for challenging rather than simple problems. Neuville and Croizet (2007) found, for example, that activating gender identity increased girls’ performance on easy math problems, but that this advantage was outweighed by a large decrease in their performance on more difficult problems.

  41. For a stereotype-threat-avoidance strategy that exploits this phenomenon, see Rydell et al. (2009).

  42. As with any complex social phenomenon, there are undoubtedly a range of factors that contribute to the effect. Theories to explain the phenomenon (or, more likely, phenomena) are manifold, and a full survey would require a full paper. For a representative example of such a theory, cf. Schmader et al. (2008), who hypothesize that “stereotype threat disrupts performance via 3 distinct, yet interrelated, mechanisms: (a) a physiological stress response that directly impairs prefrontal processing, (b) a tendency to actively monitor performance, and (c) efforts to suppress negative thoughts and emotions in the service of self-regulation. These mechanisms combine to consume executive resources needed to perform well on cognitive and social tasks. The active monitoring mechanism disrupts performance on sensorimotor tasks directly.” (Schmader et al. 2008, p. 336).

  43. I don’t know of empirical work that tries to tease apart these two possibilities.

  44. Cf. YouTube’s “Drunk History” videos, e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipV2u-MxlFc (see Drunk History n.d.) (Thanks to Brendan Dill for this pointer).

  45. Relatedly, extant hypotheses that give rise to confirmation biases can be seen as operating via easons rather than reasons. (Thanks to Brendan Dill for discussion on this point.)

  46. Some of the discussion in this section follows that in the closing pages of Gendler (2008b).

  47. To try a version of the test, see IAT Corp (1998) or Pious (2002). For discussion, see Nosek et al. (2006).

  48. Analogous studies have been conducted in other societies, with parallel results. Cf. Dunham et al. (2006, 2007).

  49. Given the argument I am making, it does not matter whether the implicit associations revealed by the IAT measure the subject’s ease of access to associations that she implicitly (though perhaps not explicitly) endorses or whether it measures her ease of access to culturally-encoded associations that she both implicitly and explicitly rejects. For discussion of this controversy, see (Karpinski and Hilton 2001; Olson and Fazio 2004; Arkes and Tetlock 2004).

  50. On the unlikely chance that you are not familiar with this effect, see Chudler (n.d.). A nice summary of the task can be found in the opening paragraphs of Richeson and Shelton (2007).

  51. For connection of this to historical discussions of the “harmonious soul” see Gendler (2008b).

  52. For representative philosophical discussion of these issues, see (Risse and Zeckhauser 2004; Lever 2005).

  53. For Tetlock’s own diagnosis of these cases, see (Tetlock et al. 2000, p. 853; also Arkes and Tetlock 2004).

  54. Heretical counterfactuals are essentially cases that invoke what I call “imaginative resistance” (Gendler 2000, 2006). So, for example, Tetlock et al. presented participants with cases such as the following: “Consider the argument If Joseph had not believed the message that Mary had conceived a child through the Holy Ghost and that there was no reason to fear taking Mary as his wife, then Jesus would have grown up without the influence of a father and would have formed a very different personality. Is it easy or difficult to accept the premise that Joseph could have decided not to believe the angel's message?” (Tetlock et al. 2000, p. 864.) I offer an alief-involving explanation of imaginative resistance in Gendler (2000, 2006, 2010).

  55. LaFree et al. (2010) also includes a discussion of effectiveness of various ameliorative strategies.

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Acknowledgements

For comments and conversation regarding early drafts, I am grateful to Richard Brooks, Jack Dovidio, Andy Egan, Jeffrey Fagan, David Hilbert, Richard Holton, Joshua Knobe, Tony Laden, Alex Madva, Jennifer Nagel, Aaron Norby, Jonathan Phillips, Richard Samuels, Eric Schwitzgebel, Susanna Siegel, Matthew Noah Smith and J.D. Trout. Thanks also to the members of John Bargh’s and Jack Dovidio’s labs (Fall 2009–Spring 2010), who introduced me to the bodies of psychological literature to which this paper makes appeal. I am immensely grateful to the audiences to whom I had a chance to present this material, including those at the Oberlin Colloquium in Epistemology (April 2010) and the Harvard/MIT “Belief and its Cousins” Mini-conference (January 2011), and at the Departments of Philosophy at Brown University (October 2010), Columbia University (February 2011), Northwestern University (March 2011), University of Illinois at Chicago Circle (March 2011) and the University of Pittsburgh (April 2011); I regret that I did not take notes in ways that allow me to acknowledge specific contributions in those settings, but they are manifold. Special thanks to my Yale Philosophy colleagues—including Facundo Alonso, George Bealer, Steve Darwall, Jay Elliot, Verity Harte, Shelly Kagan, David Possen, Barbara Sattler and Zoltán Gendler Szabó—for an incredibly helpful Faculty Lunch discussion in April 2011, and to Brendan Dill for a careful reading of the paper’s penultimate draft. My greatest thanks are reserved for my extraordinary research assistant, Takuya Sawaoka, for his tireless bibliographic work and numerous outstanding suggestions, both stylistic and substantive.

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    Tamar Szabó Gendler

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Gendler, T.S. On the epistemic costs of implicit bias. Philos Stud 156, 33–63 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9801-7

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