• DOI:10.31234/osf.io/bv2pq
• Corpus ID: 149501663

The Psychology of Implicit Intergroup Bias and the Prospect of Change

@inproceedings{Lai2017ThePO,
  title={The Psychology of Implicit Intergroup Bias and the Prospect of Change},
  author={Calvin K. Lai and Mahzarin R. Banaji},
  year={2017}
}

• Calvin K. Lai, M. Banaji
• Published 7 September 2017
• Psychology

Modern democracies must contend with the challenge of providing opportunity and fair treatment to a diverse citizenry. Discoveries from the mind sciences have revealed, however, that these values are compromised in a variety of ways. In this chapter, we focus on the biases in decisions about individuals that emanate from information about their social categories (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, age, sexuality, religion, nationality). Because everyday decisions often emerge without conscious, deliberative thought, i.e., are implicit in nature, the question of how to conceive change at the individual and societal level is fraught with scientific, practical, and moral challenges. In this chapter, we review some research on implicit social cognition to show the mental processes that thwart even basic aspirations of democratic societies. We focus on evidence concerning the malleability of implicit cognition at the level of the individual mind. Specifically, we ask what is known about changing implicit attitudes and stereotypes in the moment. Given a lifetime of learning, is change in mental states even possible? If so, do some interventions work better than others? Next, we focus on what might be done when individuals cannot be counted on to shift implicit cognition in the direction of neutrality. In such cases, are there external efforts that can be employed to assure equal opportunity and fairness in everyday decisions? The discussion is oriented toward providing the best assessment we have for understanding the constraints on thinking that jeopardize equal opportunity and fairness, and to consider the evidence to date on the possibility for change.