Implicit stereotype
An implicit bias or implicit stereotype is the pre-reflective attribution of particular qualities by an individual to a member of some social out group. It is also called an unconscious bias that stems from a natural human tendency to divide the social world into groups.
Implicit stereotypes are thought to be shaped by experience and based on learned associations between particular qualities and social categories, including race and/or gender. Individuals' perceptions and behaviors can be influenced by the implicit stereotypes they hold, even if they are sometimes unaware they hold such stereotypes. Implicit bias is an aspect of implicit social cognition: the phenomenon that perceptions, attitudes, and stereotypes can operate prior to conscious intention or endorsement. The existence of implicit bias is supported by a variety of scientific articles in psychological literature.
The term implicit stereotype was first defined by psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald in 1995. Implicit stereotypes – unconscious associations held by individuals – can influence behavior even when they contradict consciously endorsed beliefs. This effect is particularly observable in real-world contexts such as judgments of fame and hiring processes.
Organizations have implemented several evidence-based strategies to reduce implicit bias:
- Blind recruitment processes that remove identifying information
- Standardized evaluation criteria for more objective assessment
- Structured interviews to minimize subjective judgments
- Implicit bias training programs
Implicit biases, however, are thought to be the product of associations that were learned through past experiences. Implicit biases can be activated by the environment and operate prior to a person's intentional, conscious endorsement. It has also been proposed that some implicit biases originate early in child development. Implicit bias can persist even when an individual rejects the bias explicitly.
Bias, attitude, stereotype and prejudice
, stereotypes, prejudices, and bias are all examples of psychological constructs. Psychological constructs are mental associations that can influence a person's behavior and feelings toward an individual or group. If the person is unaware of these mental associations the stereotypes, prejudices, or bias is said to be implicit.Bias is defined as prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair. Bias can be seen as the overarching definition of stereotype and prejudice, because it is how we associate traits to a specific group of people. Our "implicit attitudes reflect constant exposure to stereotypical portrayals of members of, and items in, all kinds of different categories: racial groups, professions, women, nationalities, members of the LGBTQ community, disabilities, moral and political values, etc."
An attitude is an evaluative judgment of an object, a person, or a social group. An attitude is held by or characterizes a person. Implicit attitudes are evaluations that occur without conscious awareness towards an attitude object or the self.
A stereotype is the association of a person or a social group with a consistent set of traits. This may include both positive and negative traits and often exaggerate differences between groups. Common types of stereotypes include, racial, cultural, gender and social group.
Prejudice is defined as unfair negative attitude toward a social group or a member of that group. Prejudices can stem from many of the things that people observe in a different social group that include, but are not limited to, gender, sex, race/ethnicity, or religion. This is pertinent to stereotypes because a stereotype can influence the way people feel toward another group, hence prejudice.
Methods for investigation
There is a clear challenge in measuring the degree to which someone is biased. There are two different forms of bias: implicit and explicit. The two forms of bias are, however, connected. "Explicit bias encompasses our conscious attitudes which can be measured by self-report, but pose the potential of individuals falsely endorsing more socially desirable attitudes. Although implicit biases have been considered unconscious and involuntary attitudes which lie below the surface of consciousness, some people seem to be aware of their influence on their behavior and cognitive processes. The implicit-association test is one validated tool used to measure implicit bias. The IAT requires participants to rapidly pair two social groups with either positive or negative attributes."The Implicit Association Test was created by Greenwald and Banaji. The IAT measures how strongly people connect social groups such as gender or race with concepts like "good" or "bad". For example someone connecting "men" with career, it might show an implicit bias. Studies such as Nosek, Greenwald, and Banaji explore how hidden attitudes affect behavior and how people may have automatic biases even when they believe they are being fair.
Implicit-association test
The implicit-association test alleges to predict prejudice an individual has toward different social groups. The test claims to do this by capturing the differences in the time it takes respondent to choose between two unassociated but related topics. Respondents are instructed to click one of two computer keys to categorize stimuli into associated categories. When the categories appear consistent to the respondent, the time taken to categorize the stimuli will be less than when the categories seem inconsistent. An implicit association is said to exist when respondents take longer to respond to a category-inconsistent pairing than a category-consistent pairing. The implicit-association test is used in psychology for a wide array of topics. These fields include gender, race, science, career, weight, sexuality, and disability. While acclaimed and highly influential, the implicit-association test falls short of a strong scientific consensus. Critics of the implicit-association test cite studies that counterintuitively link biased test scores with less discriminatory behavior. Studies have also asserted that the implicit-association test fails to measure unconscious thought.Recently new research has found how implicit stereotypes shape behavior even when individuals are explicitly trying to use egalitarian beliefs. Devine et al. found that automatically activated stereotypes can influence social judgments through unconscious processes. This can include bias such as biased interpretation of behavior. The experiments found that if the participants were exposured to stereotype-related cues it increased the likelihood that participants would evaluate a person in ways that are consistent with the stereotype, even when the participant rejected those beliefs at a conscious level. These findings support dual-process models of social cognition, which propose that implicit and explicit attitudes operate independently and may produce conflicting behavioral tendencies.
Go/no-go association task (GNAT)
The GNAT is similar to the implicit-association test. Although the IAT reveals differential associations of two target concepts, the GNAT reveals associations within one concept.Participants are presented with word pairs among distractors. Participants are instructed to indicate "go" if the words are target pairs, or "no-go" if they are not. For example, participants may be instructed to indicate "go" if the word pairs are female names and words that are related to strength. Then, participants are instructed to indicate "go" if the word pairs are female names and words that are related to weakness. This method relies on signal detection theory; participants' accuracy rates reveal endorsement of the implicit stereotype. For example, if participants are more accurate for female-weak pairs than for female-strong pairs, this suggests the subject more strongly associates weakness with females than strength.
Semantic priming and lexical decision task
measures the association between two concepts.In a lexical decision task, subjects are presented with pair of words, and asked to indicate whether the pair are words or non-words. The theory behind semantic priming is that subjects are quicker to respond to a word if preceded by a word related to it in meaning. In other words, the word "bread" primes other words related in meaning, including butter. Psychologists utilize semantic priming to reveal implicit associations between stereotypic-congruent words. For instance, participants may be asked to indicate whether pronouns are male or female. These pronouns are either preceded by professions that are predominantly female, or male. Reaction times reveal strength of association between professions and gender.
Sentence completion
In a sentence completion task, subjects may be presented with sentences that contain stereotypic black and white names, positive and negative stereotypic black behaviors and counter-stereotypic behaviors. Subjects are asked to add to the end of a sentence in any way that is grammatical, e.g. "Jerome got an A on his test..." could be completed with "because it was easy" or "because he studied for months" or "and then he went out to celebrate". This task is used to measure stereotypic explanatory bias : participants have a larger SEB if they give more explanations for stereotype-congruent sentences than stereotype–incongruent sentences, and if they give more stereotypic-congruent explanations.Differences between measures
The Implicit Association Test, sequential priming, and other implicit bias tests, are mechanisms for determining how susceptible we are to stereotypes. They are widely used in Social Psychology, although measuring response time to a question as a good measure of implicit biases is still up for debate. "Some theorists do question the interpretation of the scores from tests such as the IAT, but the debate is still going on and responses to the criticisms are certainly widespread."In qualitative market research, researchers have described a framework called bias testing to mitigate researcher bias when designing survey questions. It involves empirically testing the survey questions with real-life respondents using interviewer moderated or technology-enabled unmoderated techniques.