The Value of Interracial Contact for Reducing Anti-Black Bias Among Non-Black Physicians: A Cognitive Habits and Growth Evaluation (CHANGE) Study Report

Abstract

Although scholars have long studied circumstances that shape prejudice, inquiry into factors associated with long-term prejudice reduction has been more limited. Using a 6-year longitudinal study of non-Black physicians in training ( N = 3,134), we examined the effect of three medical-school factors—interracial contact, medical-school environment, and diversity training—on explicit and implicit racial bias measured during medical residency. When accounting for all three factors, previous contact, and baseline bias, we found that quality of contact continued to predict lower explicit and implicit bias, although the effects were very small. Racial climate, modeling of bias, and hours of diversity training in medical school were not consistently related to less explicit or implicit bias during residency. These results highlight the benefits of interracial contact during an impactful experience such as medical school. Ultimately, professional institutions can play a role in reducing anti-Black bias by encouraging more frequent, and especially more favorable, interracial contact.

Moving Beyond Implicit Bias Training: Policy Insights for Increasing Organizational Diversity

“…Even among those that were effective, changes in implicit bias faded after 24 hr (Lai et al, 2016) and were not associated with changes in explicit bias or behavior (Forscher et al, 2019). Diversity trainings also generally do not affect implicit (or explicit) bias in the long term (Forscher et al, 2017; Onyeador et al, 2020b). In other words, implicit bias training can increase knowledge about implicit bias but does not seem to reliably reduce implicit bias itself.…”

Invalid Claims About the Validity of Implicit Association Tests by Prisoners of the Implicit Social-Cognition Paradigm

“…There have been few longitudinal studies with IATs since Cunningham et al’s (2001) seminal study. However, last year, an article examined stability over a 6-year interval ( Onyeador et al, 2020 ). Racial attitudes of more than 3,000 medical students were measured in the first year of medical school, the fourth year of medical school, and the second year of medical residency.…”

Cultural Psychology, Diversity, and Representation in Open Science

“…Moreover, open data, has a generative function, allowing researchers to test different questions from those reported in published work. For example, Onyeador et al (2020) published a three-wave longitudinal study of how contact with Black people was associated with changes in implicit and explicit bias in a large sample of physicians. The authors made their data openly available, which then allowed Schimmack (2019) to fit models that addressed the stability of implicit and explicit bias over time, a question that was not directly addressed in the original study or elsewhere in the literature.…”