Stereotyping is the default option set by our national history, but we can change the setting. We can resolve to break the bad habit of stereotyping by determining to notice when it occurs and deciding to think a different way. Devine and her colleagues conducted a compelling study of how to help people overcome their implicit biases Devine et al.
They taught university students five techniques for reducing stereotypic thinking:. These techniques are designed to help someone break the stereotype habit. Just as with any bad habit we want to change, we need to recognize what we are doing and then substitute other, more positive, behaviors in their place.
After four weeks of practicing these techniques, White university students showed significantly lower implicit prejudice against Black people, as measured by the Implicit Association Test , a reduction that persisted another four weeks after that.
The participants also indicated that they were more concerned about racial discrimination than they were before. The students who did not receive the training showed no change; their bias against Black people continued as before. Remembering that stereotypes have consequences —that they often lead to discrimination—fuels the motivation we need to break the stereotype habit, and to substitute new, better thought processes in their place.
You are an off-duty police officer, dressed in civilian clothing, who comes across a crime. You draw your gun and prepare to take action when a uniformed officer arrives. At the scene of a crime, out of uniform, weapon drawn, you probably look like a suspect—perhaps at risk for being shot by your fellow officer. An off-duty officer in this kind of situation has been shot and killed by a uniformed officer ten times in the U. Nine of those times, the officer killed was Black or Latino Baker, May 27, But it is common for police officers to come across people who may or may not be suspicious and have to determine—in an instant—whether that person is a danger, or is in danger.
Even when people really want to do the right thing, however, implicit racial stereotypes can play a role in their split-second decision-making. In the research laboratory, as on the streets, White people are more likely to mistake a wallet or a cell phone for a gun if it is held by a Black man instead of a White man Payne, Getting the facts can help. With practice and feedback, however, the participants learned to respond to the actual objects, not the color of the men holding them.
For example, Asian women underperformed on maths tests when reminded of their gender identity but not when reminded of their Asian identity. This is because Asian individuals are stereotypically seen as good at maths. In the same way, many of us belong to a few different groups — it is sometimes worth shifting the focus towards the one which gives us strength.
Gaining confidence by practising the otherwise threatening task is also beneficial, as seen with female chess players. One way to do this could be by reframing the task as a challenge. Finally, merely being aware of the damaging effects that stereotypes can have can help us reinterpret the anxiety and makes us more likely to perform better. We may not be able to avoid stereotypes completely and immediately, but we can try to clear the air of them.
Transforming Adnams towards a sustainable future — Cambridge, Cambridgeshire. Edition: Available editions United Kingdom. Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. Magdalena Zawisza , Anglia Ruskin University. The results have been quite dramatic. The subsequent use of the IAT has consistently demonstrated implicit stereotyping for a range of different social categories, particularly gender and ethnicity Greenwald et al.
Implicit stereotyping is now viewed as one aspect of implicit social cognition that is involved in a range of social judgements Payne and Gawronski, Criticisms of the findings of the IAT have questioned whether it is actually identifying a specific unconscious prejudice, unrelated to conscious judgement Oswald et al. In support of the IAT, Greenwald et al. As a consequence, if implicit stereotyping indicates a potentially-uncontrollable cognitive bias, the question then arises as to how to deal with the outcomes of it in decision-making, particularly for a person genuinely striving for a non-prejudiced judgement.
Overt prejudice has been tackled by a range of socio-political measures from anti-discrimination laws to employment interviewer training, but interventions essentially seek to persuade or compel individuals to consciously act in a non-prejudiced way.
Lai et al. Different interventions had different effects on the implicit stereotype as measured by the IAT. For example, a vivid counter-stereotypical example which the participants read —imagining walking alone at night and being violently assaulted by a White man and rescued by a Black man—was quite effective. However, of the nine interventions examined by Lai et al.
The authors concluded that, while implicit associations were malleable in the short term, these brief interventions had no long term effect. This could indicate that implicit stereotypes are firmly established and may only be responsive to intensive and long-term interventions Devine et al. Law Professor Krieger argued that lawmakers and lawyers should take account of psychological explanations of implicit bias in their judgements.
For example, in a study by Cameron et al. When this discrimination was presented as resulting from an unconscious bias, that the employer was unaware of, then the personal responsibility for the discrimination was viewed as lower by the participants. This also has potential legal significance Krieger and Fiske, , as the law has traditionally assumed that a discriminatory act is the responsibility of the individual undertaking that act, with the assumption of an underlying discriminatory motivation an intention.
The effect of an implicit stereotype bias may be a discriminatory action that the individual neither intended nor was conscious of. Implicit stereotype bias provides a challenge to the individual as the sole source and cause of their thoughts and actions. In a huge study of over two hundred thousand participants, all citizens of the USA, Axt et al. Whilst participants showed in-group favouritism, consistent hierarchies of the social groups emerged in their response times.
For ethnicity, in terms of positivity of evaluation, Whites were highest, followed by Asians, Blacks and Hispanics, with the same order obtained from participants from each of the ethnic groups. For religion, a consistent order of Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam was produced.
For the age study, positive evaluations were associated with youth, with a consistent order of children, young adults, middle-aged adults, and old adults, across participants of all ages, from their teens to their sixties. Axt et al. It is this issue that is now considered here. Implicit stereotypes are referred to in the literature, and taught to psychology students, as a cognitive bias Fiske and Taylor, When, in the past, only a specific group of people were assumed to stereotype such as authoritarians or the cognitively simple then they could be viewed as biased in terms of the liberal views of the rest of the population.
Indeed, some psychologists who the reader rightly infers to be supporters of egalitarian values are willing to reveal examples of their inadvertent use of implicit stereotypes in their own lives—to their chagrin for example, Stainton Rogers, : Now the assumption is that implicit stereotypes can affect everyone.
There also arises the question of how an unbiased judgement can be defined. This idea of an implicit stereotype as a cognitive bias is challenged here. A wheel is said to be biased if it wobbles on an axle when others do not. Different cultures—as nation states—have different belief systems that are conventionalised into different national legal systems, with dynamically changing laws.
Recently, the psychologist Haidt has examined the difference between liberals and conservatives in the USA in terms of their moral foundations. Furthermore, not all implicit stereotypes have the same cultural value. Both associations are overgeneralisations and can be labelled as stereotypes. Yet there is no large body of psychological research challenging the stereotype of the creative artist. This is because the two associations differ significantly in their socio-cultural and political meaning.
The latter presents a representation of women common in the past which is no longer acceptable in a modern liberal democracy where generations of women have politically fought hard to overcome discrimination and achieve equality. Not surprisingly, the majority of the research into stereotyping in the psychological literature has focused on very specific topics: ethnicity or race, gender, sexuality, disability and age. These are all critical issues in the political debates during the last century in Western societies, particularly the USA.
Conventional views about these social groups have also undertaken radical change in line with the greater concerns about reducing discrimination and promoting equality. As a result the common views and associated descriptive terminology of only a past generation or two are now socially unacceptable and often illegal.
These topics continue to be of significance in an ongoing political discussion about anti-discrimination and equality in modern Western democracies.
Finally, human cognitive abilities have evolved for a purpose, and implicit associations guiding rapid decision-making have a survival benefit. Fox argued that this form of pre-judgement rather than culturally based intergroup prejudices has evolutionary value. Indeed, Todd et al. The model of the person emerging from the implicit stereotyping research appears to characterise the fair-minded individual as wrestling with an implicitly biased cognitive monster within them.
However, it is argued here that this is a false image. We learn the cultural mores of our society through socialisation and daily communication with other members of the culture. We may not approve of all aspects of our culture and indeed might strongly object to some but cultural knowledge—just like other knowledge—is crucial to our pragmatic functioning in society. The wide range of semantic associations we learn in our culture can successfully guide our judgements from what to wear at a job interview, which side of the road to drive on, and how to talk to the boss.
Perception operates by employing prior probabilities that are efficiently deployed to reduce the processing requirements of treating each new experience as completely new. While explored mostly with basic object perception, Clark argued that it is applicable to social perception, and Otten et al.
For Clark perceiving is predicting. For example, we are able to quickly and efficiently recognize a friend we have arranged to meet outside a restaurant, even from quite a distance. Through repeated experience of the friend we have developed a sophisticated prediction based on a range of cues from their gait to their favourite coat. Usually, this prediction is correct and it is the person we expected.
The dynamic of the predictive brain is to minimise the error of the prediction, that is, the difference between the prediction and the experienced event.
However, an occasional error—as only one instance—will normally only have a small effect on the prior probabilities that have been developed over multiple successful perceptions. Prediction is not about being correct every time—but is about minimising error and maximising predictive accuracy. Clearly in ancient Japan without bread and butter or Western-style tables and chairs these specific implicit associations did not develop.
In social perception we can ask: what is the probability of this man being a basketball player given that he is a tall, Black professional sportsman? This likelihood is based on prior probabilities—which come from experience or knowledge of the culture—so the likelihood could be judged differently by a person from the USA compared with a person from Kenya.
The idea that stereotypes involve a belief that all members of the category share an attribute has persisted in the cognitive research Hinton, This is not the same. In a well-known study Kahneman and Tversky : gave participants a description of Jack that matched the stereotype of an engineer:.
Jack is a year-old man. He is married and has four children. He is generally conservative, careful, and ambitious. He shows no interest in political and social issues and spends most of his free time on his many hobbies which include home carpentry, sailing and mathematical puzzles. They were then asked to predict the probability of Jack actually being an engineer in a room of 30 engineers and 70 lawyers. Participants tended to ignore the base-rate probabilities 0. They argued that this strategy was not as good as using the base-rate probabilities as the description may not be valid and furthermore it could match more of the lawyer group as there are simply more of them.
However, they admitted that a Bayesian prediction could produce the likelihood of Jack being an engineer if the description was accurate and diagnostic. Outside the psychological laboratory people almost never know the base-rate probabilities Todd et al. In many cases like this, accurate demographic data is unavailable, either because it is not there or because we do not have the time and motivation to find it—we can only rely on our general knowledge of engineers.
The Bayesian brain develops its statistical probabilities from experience of engineers—such as the engineers encountered in life and learnt about through the media. The likelihood that an engineer is a man who is uninterested in politics and likes mathematical puzzles does not mean that all engineers must have these attributes, simply that these are frequently encountered in engineers in the social world, such as the engineer Howard Wolowitz in the popular US sitcom The Big Bang Theory , Consider the following example where I could find some demographic information Footnote 1.
There are 70 professional golfers and 30 professional basketball players in a room all men and from the USA. What is the probability that he is a basketball player? Using only the base-rate probabilities Tom should be predicted to be a golfer. However, a Bayesian analysis of the demographic data agrees with the representativeness heuristic that it is very likely that Tom is a basketball player.
Rather than assuming that human cognition is statistically naive, an alternative explanation is that people are unconsciously Bayesian and they normally assume that a description identifying learnt implicit associations is accurate and diagnostic unless they consciously decide otherwise.
Outside of the psychological laboratory it may be that a limited description is all the information people have to go on. However, in an encounter with the specific person, they will learn new information to adjust this view if the prediction is not supported.
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