The overwhelming majority of those who theorize about implicit biases posit that these biases are caused by some sort of association. However, what exactly this claim amounts to is rarely specified. In this paper, I distinguish between different understandings of association, and I argue that the crucial senses of association for elucidating implicit bias are the cognitive structure and mental process senses. A hypothesis is subsequently derived: if associations really underpin implicit biases, then implicit biases should be modulated by counterconditioning or extinction but should not be modulated by rational argumentation or logical interventions. This hypothesis is false; implicit biases are not predicated on any associative structures or associative processes but instead arise because of unconscious propositionally structured beliefs. I conclude by discussing how the case study of implicit bias illuminates problems with popular dual-process models of cognitive architecture. Implicit biases have received much attention, and for good reason: many pernicious and ubiquitous forms of prejudice are perpetuated because of them. A person with a strong implicit bias against African Americans is apt to smile less at them and to cut off conversations with them sooner (McConnell and Leibold 2001). Such a person also rates African Americans lower than Caucasians on a host of socialstatus scales. These generalizations hold even when the subject who harbors such a bias has explicitly egalitarian attitudes toward all racial groups. Implicit biases also appear to be a major determinant of institutional bias, since they can explain how a group of explicitly egalitarian people can still make biased group decisions. These are serious problems, and the phenomenon causing them demands serious attention.Enormous amounts of data have been collected in order to verify the psychological reality of implicit biases. Yet these investigations have been largely atheoretical; comparatively little has been written about the cognitive causes of implicit bias, even by the data-driven, theory-wary standards of social psychology. This is an unfortunate oversight. Examining the workings of implicit bias can illuminate a host of foundational issues in cognitive science, such as the entities that populate the unconscious mind, and how rationally responsive unconscious thought can be. The study of implicit bias is deeply intertwined with questions of how learning interacts with cognitive structure. This relationship can aid in building C 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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A Bayesian mind is, at its core, a rational mind. Bayesianism is thus well‐suited to predict and explain mental processes that best exemplify our ability to be rational. However, evidence from belief acquisition and change appears to show that we do not acquire and update information in a Bayesian way. Instead, the principles of belief acquisition and updating seem grounded in maintaining a psychological immune system rather than in approximating a Bayesian processor.

After presenting evidence about categorization behavior, this paper argues for the following theses: 1) that there is a border between perception and cognition; 2) that the border is to be characterized by perception being modular (and cognition not being so); 3) that perception outputs conceptualized representations, so views that posit that the output of perception is solely non-conceptual are false; and 4) that perceptual content consists of basic-level categories and not richer contents.