Implicit bias and social schema: a transactive memory approach

Abstract

To what extent should we focus on implicit bias in order to eradicate persistent social injustice?Structural prioritizers argue that we should focus less on individual minds than on unjust social structures, while equal prioritizers think that both are equally important. This article introduces the framework of transactive memory into the debate to defend the equal priority view. The transactive memory framework helps us see how structure can emerge from individual interactions as an irreducibly social product. If this is right, then debiasing interventions are structural interventions. One upshot is that the utility of the individual versus structural distinction is not apparent for the purposes of intervention. 1.Recent work in this literature, such as Machery et al. (2010), Madva (2016 and Davidson and Kelly (2018), has sought to undermine the utility of this distinction by highlighting the explanatory power of psychologistic explanations. Call this position equal prioritism. In this vein, this paper introduces the framework of transactive memory into the debate to defend a t3 focus on individual minds, but without relinquishing the importance of structures in shaping those minds. According to the transactive memory framework, a collective memory product can emerge from the interactions between individuals. This framework helps us see structure and individuals as two components of a dynamical system, guiding us to diagnose more effective sites of intervention. Individual minds are not merely shaped by structures, but actively shape structures. The implication is that implicit bias interventions are not merely necessary for social justice, but equally important as structural interventions.It is important to note that this strategy departs from the state-based conception of the individualist-structuralist debate. The debate is currently founded on a conceptual distinction between minds and structures. On this conception, the question is: Are minds or structures the main ongoing cause of the inequality in question? As Davidson and Kelly ( 2018) have argued, this conceptual distinction is not a clean ontological one, because some informal "soft structures", such as norms, are internalized. My account is motivated by this ontological overlap to shift the debate toward thinking about the processes that create and sustain minds and structure. In other words, the focus is on the causal connection between the two rather than the causal weight of each element, considered in isolation, in producing injustice. By reframing the individualist-structuralist debate to emphasize the dynamic processes by which structures and biased minds mutually sustain themselves, we can see that our policy options do not take the form of either-structural-or-individualistic choices. Individualistic interventions can have structural effects, and vice versa. I proceed as follows. In Section 2, I situate structural prioritism and equal prioritism within the conceptual landscape of the individualism-structuralism debate. I highlight the connecti...

Social structural explanation

“…65–66). Madva (2016), Davidson and Kelly (2020), Soon (2020) leverage this ontological fuzziness to argue that social phenomena are best explained by the interaction of individuals and structure, neither of which takes priority.…”

Algorithmic bias: on the implicit biases of social technology

“…31 It additionally bolsters the point that combating problematic biases will require a two-pronged solution that focuses both on the individual and structural level. See Antony 2016 and Huebner 2016, as well as the debate between so-called 'structural prioritizers ' and 'anti-anti-individualists', including Haslanger 2015, 2016b,a, Ayala Lopez 2016, Ayala Lopez and Vasilyeva 2015, Ayala Lopez and Beeghly 2020, Madva 2016, and Soon 2019 example, the fact that women are underrepresented in philosophy. Some hiring committee aware that this is partly the result of explicit and implicit biases toward women in philosophy might anonymize applications in an attempt to eliminate the effects a candidate's gender has on her application.…”

Oppressive Things*

“…Anyone who has passed through similar social and physical environments will construct the relevant patterns of thought and action just as Enby has, effortlessly and effectively; after all, Enby’s actions are patterned on their pervious interactions with similar physical situations, and anyone who has a similar learning history to Enby will engage with this highly structured environment in a similar way. At least in part, this is because the organization and layout of the apartment that Enby encounters is constituted by numerous familiar kinds of material and social structures, which work in concert to facilitate the retrieval of memories that have been encoded in similar kinds of contexts (compare Soon 2020). And spaces like apartments reflect facts about human cities, which organize a wide range of human‐environment interaction mappings.…”