Biased against Debiasing: On the Role of (Institutionally Sponsored) Self-Transformation in the Struggle against Prejuice

Abstract

Research suggests that interventions involving extensive training or counterconditioning can reduce implicit prejudice and stereotyping, and even susceptibility to stereotype threat. This research is widely cited as providing an "existence proof" that certain entrenched social attitudes are capable of change, but is summarily dismissed-by philosophers, psychologists, and activists alike-as lacking direct, practical import for the broader struggle against prejudice, discrimination, and inequality. Criticisms of these debiasing procedures fall into three categories: concerns about empirical efficacy, about practical feasibility, and about the failure to appreciate the underlying structural-institutional nature of discrimination. I reply to these criticisms of debiasing, and argue that a comprehensive strategy for combating prejudice and discrimination should include a central role for training our biases away. IntroductionMore than a decade of research suggests that implicit biases can be transformed (or at least considerably weakened) by interventions that involve extensive training or counterconditioning. In particular, Kerry Kawakami and colleagues have demonstrated the benefits of: counterstereotype training, which involves repeatedly affirming counterstereotypes, for example, by responding "yes" to an image of a black person paired with the word "friendly," or by repeatedly pairing images of women with words like "powerful" and "courageous;" and In addition to reducing bias on a variety of indirect measures, including the Implicit Association Test (IAT), these training procedures:• reorient unreflective social behaviors, for example, by leading white and Asian participants to instinctively sit closer to a black interlocutor; • make stereotypes less likely to come to mind and color judgment, for example, by reducing the likelihood that participants recommend hiring a man over an equally qualified woman; and • reduce susceptibility to stereotype threat, for example, by improving women's performance on math tests even though they have just been reminded of pervasive stereotypes about gender and mathematical aptitude, and would otherwise feel anxiety and underperform.While this research is often cited as providing a sort of "existence proof" that certain entrenched social attitudes are capable of change, it is summarily dismissed by social scientists, philosophers, and activists as lacking direct, practical import for the broader struggle against prejudice and discrimination. For example, David Schneider's 568-page opus on social cognition, The Psychology of Stereotyping, devotes only a single paragraph to this research on "retraining," concluding that, "Obviously, in everyday life people are not likely to get such deliberate training" (2004, 423). I find the widespread dismissal of these training procedures puzzling. Implicit biases influence whom we trust and whom we ignore, whom we promote and for whom we vote. They affect interactions between teachers and students, doctors and patients, police and civilians, ...

Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility

“…At issue here is what I call local control , the ability to directly control implicit discrimination in particular instances, which differs from indirect control , which involves taking steps in advance to block discrimination (e.g. anonymous reviewing) and long‐term control , which involves debiasing one's social habits through repeated practice (Madva, , ,b, forthcoming; see also Holroyd, , §2.2; Levy, ). A central consideration is whether implicit discrimination is altogether uncontrollable or merely difficult to control .…”

“…See Madva, , ,b, forthcoming, ms., although I intend to say more in future work about the forward‐looking role that responsibility and blame can play in motivating activism to initiate and implement structural‐institutional reform. Cf.…”

Implicit attitudes and the social capacity for free will

“…Women that are subtly trained to associate women with good performance at math-related activities actually perform better than those who are not (Madva, 2015). It has been reported that people who purposefully and continuously confront themselves with counter-stereotypical images and associations have decreased implicit prejudice for at least eight weeks (Devine, Forscher, Austin, & Cox, 2012).…”

Responsibility for implicit bias

“…If this is the aim, then devolving responsibility to individuals is a flawed strategy: because there exist few studies that show the long‐term efficacy of changes to implicit biases (Lai et al, , though cf. Madva, ms.). The point is not that individuals should not try to de‐bias (see Madva, ms. for the claim that such efforts, are, in the grand scheme of things, rather small), nor that individual attitude change is not relevant at all; but that such efforts should not be independent of institutional change, which itself requires that individuals are motivated to institute and sustain those changes.…”