The Judgment Bias Task: A flexible method for assessing individual differences in social judgment biases

Abstract

is an officer and both he and J. R. Axt are consultants of Project Implicit, Inc., a nonprofit organization with the mission to "develop and deliver methods for investigating and applying phenomena of implicit social cognition, including especially phenomena of implicit bias based on age, race, gender, or other factors." The authors declared that they had no other potential conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article. Author Contributions: All authors developed the concept of studies 1a and 2a. J. R. Axt and H. N. Nguyen programmed studies 1a and 2a and analyzed the data. For all other studies, J. R. Axt and B.A. Nosek developed the concept, with J.R. Axt programming them and analyzing the data. J. R. Axt drafted the manuscript, and B. A. Nosek and H.N. Nguyen edited it. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.

The Impact of Awareness on Reducing Social Bias in Behavior

“…We sought to collect 655 participants for each of the five experimental conditions who completed at least the JBT (total N = 3275). This sample provided more than 99% power for detecting a small (Cohen's d = .2) within-subjects effect size for each condition, and nearly 100% power for detecting the size of the within-subjects effect (d = .31) found in a previous sample of participants from the same source (Axt, et al, 2017;Study 1b). Between conditions, this sample size provides greater than 80% power at detecting a Cohen's d = .155, which would mean an intervention halved the size of the criterion bias found in the previous sample.…”

“…These attractiveness and ingroup biases exist over a range of outcomes (e.g., Beehr & Gilmore, 1982;Cash & Kilcullen, 1985;Hosoda, Stone-Romero, & Coats, 2003;Johnson, Podratz, Dipboye, & Gibbons, 2010) and are robust, with meta-analytic estimates of d = .61 for attractiveness (Feingold, 1992) and d = .36 for ingroup favoritism (Mullen, Brown & Smith, 1992). Moreover, these biases were selected due to their applicability to various sample populations (i.e., neither is dependent on participant characteristics like race, gender, or age) and given previous evidence that they can exist among people reporting a desire to be unbiased and a perception of having behaved fairly (Axt, Nguyen, & Nosek, 2017).…”

“…In all studies, we assessed social bias using the Judgment Bias Task (JBT; Axt, et al, 2017). In the JBT, participants evaluate a series of profiles for a specific outcome, such as membership to an academic honor society.…”

“…The JBT is a flexible and reliable measure of bias in behavior (median ɑ = .70 for criterion threshold towards each social group in Axt, et al, 2017). For example, in Axt et al (2017) participants had a lower criterion for admission to an academic honor society for applicants coming from their own versus a rival school, or their own versus a rival political party, meaning that applicants were more likely to be accepted when coming from one's own school or political party, regardless of qualification.…”

“…For example, in Axt et al (2017) participants had a lower criterion for admission to an academic honor society for applicants coming from their own versus a rival school, or their own versus a rival political party, meaning that applicants were more likely to be accepted when coming from one's own school or political party, regardless of qualification. Moreover, across four studies using both online and lab samples, the JBT consistently detected a bias with lower criterion for more versus less physically attractive applicants (average d = .37; Axt et al, 2017). In Study 1, we tested the effectiveness of four interventions at reducing the degree of favoritism toward physically attractive people on the JBT.…”