Personal reflection of Implicit Bias

An unconscious relation, belief, or attitude towards any social group is implicit bias.

People may also assign those attributes or characteristics to all members of a social category, a

phenomenon known as stereotyping, due to implicit biases (Jost et al., 2009). It is necessary to

note that on an unconscious level, implicit prejudices work almost entirely. While there are

deliberate and controllable overt biases and prejudices, implicit biases are less so.

A person can also express explicit disagreement about a certain attitude or faith while still

carrying more unconscious similar preconditions. These distinctions don't actually fit with our

personal identity and context. Often people can be correlated positively or negatively with their

own ethnicity, gender, faith, sexuality, or other personal characteristics. Although people may

like to believe they are not subject to these prejudices and biases, the fact is that everyone gets

entangled with them, whether or not they like it. However, the fact does not inherently imply that

you are prejudicial or prone to discriminate against anyone. It means clearly that the brain

functions in a way that blends and generalizes.

Besides the fact that our world is conditioned by our current stereotypes in the society in

which we were born, it is typically not possible to isolate yourself from the social impact.

However, you will learn more about your unconscious thought and how culture affects you.

These implicit biases are induced by the natural propensity to screen, sort, and categorize details

about the world. Because of these patterns, we are vulnerable to partiality:

We prefer to search for patterns

Implicit bias is due to the inherent inclination of the brain to pursue trends and

connections in the environment. Social cognition is based on the capacity of social partners to

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store, process, and apply knowledge in social situations. So, we are doing the same thing and

following the existing trends and discriminating against others based on race, color, caste, and

creed.

We want to use shortcuts

Like other cognitive preconceptions, the unconscious propensity of the brain to try to

simplify the environment results. Since the brain is continuously overwhelmed with more

information, it is quicker and easier for the brain to sort all these details than it could have

expected.

Our social background plays a part in this

Experiences affect implicit biases, but these behaviors may not be the product of direct

personal experiences. Cultural conditioning, media exposure, and education may all lead to the

implicit relation that representatives of other social groups make. Media plays a major role in

discriminating black over white by introducing whitening creams in the market and by showing

“Black” is bad and “White” is good and based on that, we judge people around us.

In 1995, social psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Tony Greenwald coined the word

implicit discrimination. They suggested that social activity was primarily affected by

unconscious combinations and assumptions in an important paper describing their theory of

implied society cognition. The now popular Implicit Association Test (IAT) by Banaji and

Greenwald was published in 1998 to support their hypothesis. The trial uses a computer program

to show respondents how long they need to choose between two items, with a selection of

images and phrases. Things might be shown in combination with either a positive word or a

negative word, for example, on the face of various ethnic backgrounds. Those who click on a

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positive message will then be asked whether they saw a picture of a race and to click a

derogatory word if they saw a race other than that. To assess unconceding gender, weight,

sexuality, disability, and other fields, in addition to a testing of the implicit racial attitudes (Sabin

et al. 2009). In the last decade, the IAT has become increasingly common and used, but recently

it has come under fire.

Findings that the test results may be inadequate in reliability are the most important.

Respondents can achieve high results in the racial distortion on one test and low on the next test.

It is also troubling that the test scores cannot actually correspond with individual behaviors.

Individuals may have high results for some kind of IAT bias, but these results may not reliably

predict how they contribute to a particular social group.

Work Cited

Jost, J., Rudman, L., Blair, I., Carney, D., Dasgupta, N., Glaser, J., and Hardin, C., 2009. The

existence of implicit bias is beyond reasonable doubt: A refutation of ideological and

methodological objections and executive summary of ten studies that no manager should

ignore. Research in Organizational Behavior, 29, pp.39-69.

Janice A. Sabin, Brian A. Nosek, Anthony G. Greenwald, and Frederick P. Rivara, 2009.

Physicians’ Implicit and Explicit Attitudes About Race by MD Race, Ethnicity, and

Gender. Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved, 20(3), pp.896-913.