1. The presentation discusses unconscious or implicit bias and how it can influence behavior and decision-making. 2. Only 2% of cognition is consciously accessible, while unconscious networks and schemas process information quickly and automatically based on stereotypes and biases developed through culture and experience. 3. Tests of implicit association and priming experiments reveal that people often have implicit biases that do not align with their explicit beliefs and values. 4. These unconscious biases can be activated and influenced by environmental cues and situational factors, demonstrating that pursuing race-neutral policies may not be effective in addressing the effects of implicit bias.

1. Reading between the Lines: Uncovering Unconscious Bias john a. powell Williams Chair in Civil Rights & Civil Liberties, Moritz College of Law Director, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity September 30, 2009 Los Angeles, California

2. Presentation Overview Unconscious networks Implicit Association Implicit Bias Priming Race-Neutrality? Additional Links

3. The Conscious & Unconscious Mind 2% of emotional cognition is available to us consciously If messages about race are not framed in terms that address conscious networks, unconscious attitudes will triumph Racial bias tends to reside more in the unconscious network “You want to appeal to the level of consciousness that activates the right emotions.” Source: Drew Westen, The Political Brain

4. Our Unconscious Networks What colors are the following lines of text?

5. Our Unconscious Networks What colors are the following lines of text?

6. Our Unconscious Networks What colors are the following lines of text?

7. Our Unconscious Networks What colors are the following lines of text?

8. Our Unconscious Networks What colors are the following lines of text?

9. Implicit Association How we behave often hinges on factors of which we are unaware People’s minds operate through schemas “ Schemas are simply templates of knowledge that help us organize specific examples into broad categories.” The schemas we use to categorize people are called stereotypes Stereotyping and prejudice are not the same Source: http://americansforamericanvalues.org/unconsciousbias/

10. Implicit Association and Bias “Both history and societal factors play a crucial role in providing the content of schemas, which are programmed through culture, media, and the material context.” Implicit bias lives within our schemas Bias doesn’t make you prejudiced; it makes you a person Source: http://americansforamericanvalues.org/unconsciousbias/

11. Implicit Bias – The Shooter Game In a video-game experiment, images of suspects - both armed and unarmed, black and white – flash rapidly on a monitor. Within a split-second, subjects must decide whether to shoot. Participants must assess whether the man in each picture is carrying a gun. Within 850 milliseconds they must press one key to shoot or another to leave the figure unharmed. After repeated experimentation, people’s mistakes, although rare, follow a pattern: They shoot more unarmed blacks than unarmed whites; They fail to shoot more whites than blacks are holding weapons.

12. What Would You Do?

13. Implicit Association Test http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2007/08/19/ https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

14. Implicit Bias – Unconscious Modeling The Kanizsa Triangle

15. Implicit Bias – Unconscious Modeling The Ponzo Illusion

16. Awareness Test Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrqrkihlw-s

17. Priming Our environment affects our unconscious networks Priming activates mental associations Telling someone a scary story activates a frame of fear Claude Steele’s “stereotype threat”: For example, tell students about to take a test that Asian students tend to do better than whites, and the whites will perform significantly worse than if they had not been primed to think of themselves as less capable than Asians. Source: http://www.eaop.ucla.edu/0405/Ed185%20-Spring05/Week_6_May9_2005.pdf

18. Race-Neutrality? Given the forces of implicit bias, framing, and priming, race neutrality is neither reasonable nor effective It is important to understand implicit bias and how it operates in order to understand how it affects our society

19. www.KirwanInstitute.org

20. Links http://americansforamericanvalues.org/ https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ Examples of priming http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v = yrqrkihlw-s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqGqGwRaILg