Implicit-Bias Remedies: Treating Discriminatory Bias as a Public-Health Problem

Abstract

Accumulated findings from studies in which implicit-bias measures correlate with discriminatory judgment and behavior have led many social scientists to conclude that implicit biases play a causal role in racial and other discrimination. In turn, that belief has promoted and sustained two lines of work to develop remedies: (a) individual treatment interventions expected to weaken or eradicate implicit biases and (b) group-administered training programs to overcome biases generally, including implicit biases. Our review of research on these two types of sought remedies finds that they lack established methods that durably diminish implicit biases and have not reproducibly reduced discriminatory consequences of implicit (or other) biases. That disappointing conclusion prompted our turn to strategies based on methods that have been successful in the domain of public health. Preventive measures are designed to disable the path from implicit biases to discriminatory outcomes. Disparity-finding methods aim to discover disparities that sometimes have obvious fixes, or that at least suggest where responsibility should reside for developing a fix. Disparity-finding methods have the advantage of being useful in remediation not only for implicit biases but also systemic biases. For both of these categories of bias, causes of discriminatory outcomes are understood as residing in large part outside the conscious awareness of individual actors. We conclude with recommendations to guide organizations that wish to deal with biases for which they have not yet found solutions.

Keywords: disparity finding; implicit bias; prevention; public health; systemic bias.

Fig. 1.

Usage, from 1969 through 2019, of six concepts prominent in scholarly understanding of intergroup discrimination. This plot was produced in Google Ngram (https://books.google.com/ngrams/) by entering the six two-word terms, separated by commas, into the Ngram Viewer’s search box.

Fig. 2.

Representation of associations involved in responding to an Implicit Association Test gender–science stereotype measure. The left panel shows four categories in a stereotype-consistent structure; associations link all categories and exemplars for the instructions that request a response to each key. The red arrows represent the stereotype-consistent associations. In the right panel, these associations cross between the keys, comprising a source of interference in providing the instructed responses.