December 1, 2025 • 46 mins
First I was sure implicit bias explained everything. Then I was sure it explained nothing. These days, though, I'm in more of an awkward in-between.
In this episode, I walk through how I got convinced, de-convinced, and and landed here — still side-eyeing the science on implicit bias, but not ready to write it off completely.
Click here to support Marie's work and catch up on all the new members-only episodes, which are released weekly.
Oh, and here's that article I mentioned, and here's my past episode on implicit bias on Apple and Spotify.
In this episode, I walk through how I got convinced, de-convinced, and and landed here — still side-eyeing the science on implicit bias, but not ready to write it off completely.
Click here to support Marie's work and catch up on all the new members-only episodes, which are released weekly.
Oh, and here's that article I mentioned, and here's my past episode on implicit bias on Apple and Spotify.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
And then what happened. What do you think happened? Well,
it's what always happens with me, which is I've changed
my mind over time. Hello, and welcome back to the podcast.
On today's episode, I want to talk about why I
(00:22):
cannot make up my mind about implicit bias, or more accurately,
why I keep making up my mind about implicit bias
only to learn new information and then change my mind again.
I have made up my mind about implicit bias three
different times now. It's been a winding road, to say
the least. And you've probably heard me talk about implicit
(00:44):
bias maybe in years past, but I have very different
feelings about it these days. And I haven't shared this
full journey, this full arc I've been on, so I
think now's the time I'll talk through how I first
became very convinced of implicit bias when I got involved
(01:06):
with activism. I started to believe that there's this subtle prejudice,
this subtle racism, shaping every move we make. And I
was like, oh, my goodness, this is the key that
explains everything else. But then fast forward a little bit
I learned from skeptics of implicit bias skeptics of the
implicit association test, and I became so thoroughly unconvinced. I
(01:30):
was like, oh, my goodness, that's all a sham. I
see the evidence, and I see how implicit bias as
we make sense of it is totally made up. And
then fast forward another little bit, and where I'm at
now is much more of a gray zone. I am
neither fully convinced of implicit bias nor fully unconvinced. I've
(01:52):
been unconvinced of the unconvincing and now I'm just in
the middle. When I'm in the middle on something, I
usually shut up about it until I make up my
mind again. But if I did that, then where would
that leave all of you who are also in the
middle on things, and who also can't make up your
(02:13):
mind about things. Maybe it'd be helpful to hear someone's
journey when they're not in a spot where they've landed
firmly on one side or another, but they're just still
metabolizing all of the new bits and all of the information.
So that's the idea. This episode isn't meant to be
the most formal, the most intellectual review of implicit bias
(02:37):
ever to exist. It's more of my casual First I
thought this, and then I heard that, and then I
was like, oh, my goodness, but what about that thing
that's going to be our vibe? Okay, great, So let's
start at the beginning. When I first became very convinced
of implicit bias. In my earlier activism days, I learned
(02:59):
about implicit bias, and really, you always seem to be
taught about implicit bias in tandem with another key concept,
which is and he guesses systemic racism. At least that's
been my observation. And these two concepts, implicit bias systemic racism,
they're kind of presented to you as these twin issues.
(03:24):
They fit together to form this meta narrative which helps
you make sense of the world and helps you to see, oh,
my goodness, racism is working all the time, whether we
see it or not, and whether we intend for it
to be or not. And if we are passive, it's
still churning, it's still going. The beast of racism is
(03:45):
just lurking, it's crouching, it's prowling at the door, and
it doesn't take our active participation, our cooperation, our deliberate involvement.
It just happens. And so implicit bias is given to
you as this like key concept of how it just
happens in your mind, how racism is working even when
(04:07):
you don't know what's working. And then systemic racism is
the catch all term for saying, and here's how racism
happens in the world and how it's working even if
you don't know that it's working. So implicit bias and
systemic racism, I'm given both of them in the same sandwich.
And I'm taught a different view of racism than the
(04:30):
one that most of us grew up with. Most of
us when we were young believed that racism was mostly
intentional acts of malice, and racism was mostly executed by
bad actors. But then we get these very advanced psychological
concepts or sociological concepts, and it's like, well, think again. Racism,
(04:52):
it turns out, is autonomous, and it is present, and
it is growing whether you realize it or not, whether
you like like it or not, and whether you intend
for it or not. And it works at the individual
level through something called implicit bias. It's a hidden evil
that's living inside all of us, and at the grand scale,
(05:13):
it's working through something called systemic racism. And these are
the ways that racism has managed to live on even
though in today's day and age nobody claims to want
to be racist. That was kind of like the aha
new worldview that I put on when I first got
involved with activism, and so I became convinced that implicit
(05:33):
prejudice was always pulling the strings in people's minds, and
it had almost a mystical air about it. First of all,
it made so much sense because I knew for a
fact that many people aren't as moral as they intend
to be, or as moral as they claim to be.
(05:54):
You know, the guy who says I'm not sexist, but
is totally about to say something sexist, and he's totally
the most sexist person in the room. That's just how
it works. The people who are the most defensive, were
the most insistent that they aren't racist, are really just
the people who are in denial that they're kind of racist.
And that's what this whole implicit bias concept seem to
(06:17):
have this scientific backing and say, no, it really is
a fact. The people who don't think they're racist, they
always are. Everyone is, and the only difference is some
people acknowledge it and realize it and admit it, and
other people are in denial. And once you bring it
in from psychology and you're like, oh, wow, there's studies,
there's this test, there's this whole thing, you're like, it's
(06:40):
an irrefutable fact. So now, if you tell someone that
they are implicitly racist meaning and I should have defined
this term by implicit bias, I mean like hidden racism,
hidden prejudice. Now, at the first introduction to implicit bias,
when I was early in my activismy I thought of
(07:01):
it like a mystical thing because people would always use abstract,
non literal language to paint the picture. How many times
have we heard about implicit bias. That it's in the
air we breathe, it's like poison in the water we drink.
It's affecting all of us and we don't even realize it.
And they use all of these metaphors and analogies to
(07:24):
convey just how pervasive it is. But the more we
rely on those metaphors and analogies, the more we kind
of drift from any concrete understanding, like what is the
mechanism by which we all have this hidden racism. How
does that hidden racism show up? Does it have to
show up? Or if it doesn't show up, is it
still there? I think it's still there no matter what.
(07:45):
Is it still as bad? Though? If it's not showing up,
that seems like it's not as bad. And so I
didn't know for sure in concrete terms what the implications
of implicit bias were, but whatever they were, I knew
that they were huge. I felt like it kind of
rocked my world to have this discovery that everyone you
(08:07):
ever meet is racist and that goodwill, good intentions that's
not enough, or trying to become unracist, that's not enough.
And this idea of implicit racial bias is what leads
to the related idea, which is that we can't just
be non racist. We have to be anti racist because
racism is the default. So we need to counter the default.
(08:29):
We need to go above and beyond. And even then,
racism is this huge beast, is everywhere, It's in everyone.
And so the concept of implicit bias, when it really
sunk in for me, I would say, darkened my worldview considerably,
and it played into just a widespread mistrust or distrust
(08:53):
of people and white people specifically, because if you really
buy into it, not just in its most limited definition
or most specific and precise, concrete definition, but like I said,
there's a wider culture, a broader movement to embrace it
more as an idea and more as a metaphor and
an analogy for making sense of everything. And when you
(09:15):
do that, it just grows and grows and grows. So
you imagine that in every person you ever meet, every
person you ever walk by on the street, there are
these evil gears turning in their mind twenty four to
seven three sixty five. And that's pretty scary. That's quite
the uphill battle. That's a lot to deal with. And
then you also are convinced that nobody has the self
(09:37):
awareness to even realize that they have these evil gears turning.
Now it's going to be doubly hard to deal with
this evil that's crashing in against you from all sides,
from all people. And then because you believe that there
are these evil gears turning in their minds, you also
just get a pretty specific, narrow view of any situation,
(10:01):
which is that entering into literally any social situation, which
for me, it would be like a college classroom, or
my job at the time, or I remember specifically, I'd
walk into a bank and it would be all white
people in the bank, and I'd think, oh, my gosh,
it's all white people, and they all have that evil
in their minds. And I know that this is a
(10:22):
harmless experience. I don't think I'll be harmed, but like,
I'm not not afraid of being harmed. I know what
I'm up against, and I just remember how implicit bias
colored my view of everything, every situation, every room I
walked in. I'm not trying to caricature it. I'm just
trying to say, like it added gravity to contexts where
(10:44):
I knew I wouldn't probably be in harm's way, but
it added this like nagging voice of like, but you
might be because you never know, because you know that
evil is lurking in their minds and they don't even
know it. So you know, gear up for battle now.
Like I said, I didn't begin with this understanding of
(11:04):
implicit racial bias. None of us really did, because implicit
bias as a concept didn't even hit the scene until
the turn of the century, like around nineteen ninety eight
two thousand. That's when we all started to hear about
implicit bias, and so people in pretty much every generation
did not grow up with this notion that everyone is
automatically racist. I think maybe kids who are just growing
(11:28):
up today would be the first generation to hear that
idea from a young age, which worries me a little bit.
We'll get into that, but back at the beginning. It
goes without saying that when I was a child, I
did not believe that people carried around hidden race based prejudices.
I had a more typical or traditional concept of racism.
(11:52):
I believe that people who made race based judgments are racist,
and people who don't treat people equally are racist. I
knew that that was a concept, and I knew that
that was a category, but I figured that it was
a very small category, and it was something that was
more so belonging in the past, not my daily present.
(12:13):
I still experienced racism, and when I did, I'd be like, Wow,
somebody said a racist thing. That's strange because racism doesn't
belong here. And now, racism belongs in the past and
not the present. So I understood what racism was. I had,
sadly an early introduction to racism, but I had the
(12:33):
more simple, straightforward logical view, which is, a person is
racist if they decide to be racist, not A person
is racist, whether they realize it or not, and whether
they admit it or not. And maybe if they admit
it and they own up to it, that can make
them less racist. But really there's no way to undo it.
But they have to be anti racist to more than
cancel out their racism. But even when you do that,
(12:54):
you still can never do enough, and they'll always be
in this debt because they have a white socialization in
their white nones. All of that stuff obviously was not
in this brain when I was a child, And as
I'll explained throughout this episode, I have an admiration for
this simple, straightforward logical view because to this day in
(13:16):
progressive circles, I don't think we give enough credit to
that typical view of racism, that traditional, long standing view
of racism. And when we've introduced the concept of implicit
bias and we know so much and so little about
systemic racism, I'm not saying systemic racism is not real.
I could even do an episode later in the series
(13:37):
why I can't make up my mind about systemic racism
because I have such a love hate relationship with that term,
because I think it just plays into this thing of
causing so much confusion and disconnecting the actual problem racism, prejudice,
discrimination from our concept of it, because it's just this big, large,
abstract thing and we feel like it's everywhere, We feel
(13:59):
like it's crashing in on us, and it's routing the world,
but we can't actually boil it down into tangibles, and
so again, it just really darkens our worldview, maybe more
than it ought to. Not that these aren't real problems,
but just that maybe in our minds they shouldn't stay
such abstract problems. So anyway back to my being very
(14:22):
convinced of implicit and then I'll pivot and tell you
how I became very unconvinced. I think if I had
to choose one real practical issue with being deeply convinced
of implicit bias, it would be that implicit bias becomes
a trump card. Because if you believe that everyone is
(14:45):
probably racist and they just don't realize that they're racist,
and you believe loosely in something that you're like, well
it's scientific, it's science, implicit bias is science. Then you're
really convinced, and you can't be unconvinced that every person
you ever meet has these subtle prejudices, but they're hidden prejudices,
so you also can't exactly identify them. I think it
(15:07):
plays into what's become a norm within the social justice movement,
which is people often say, if it seems racist, it
is racist, or it might not be those words exactly,
but there's this general like you can be confident that
if you suspect anything, it is that bad thing, because
bad things are everywhere all the time, which in some
(15:28):
ways this is helpful to say that a lot of
the time you probably can make a correct assumption, your
hunch actually may be right, and so often racism doesn't
show up, like, Hi, I'm intending to be racist right now,
I'm intending to discriminate against you. This is my prejudice talking.
It doesn't announce itself, and so a lot is kind
(15:52):
of a gray area and it is left up to assumption. However,
when you just have this like Trump card loose pseudoscience
y thing, you don't actually know the science, you don't
actually know the studies, but you just know the concept
and the supposed conclusion, which is, oh, my goodness, it
turns out everyone is actually completely racist. That really sets
(16:13):
you over in your confidence of being able to conclude
that in any situation which might have been completely innocuous,
completely harmless, devoid of racism, you might walk away pretty
confident that the people there were racist towards you, or
can't be trusted, or just aren't safe, and you'd have
(16:34):
good reason to believe that, because you're carrying around this
like major abstract science y type belief that there is
an evil force that is acting upon you at all times,
and so having that kind of trump card, I think,
honestly for years gotten the way of me being able
to see a situation clearly or see it for what
(16:56):
it was. It definitely helped me to see potential racism
in situations. It's weird that I'm saying, like believed or
was convinced of implicit bias. It seems like something that's
a fact, you don't believe in it or not believe
in it. You aren't convinced or unconvinced it should be
something that just is. But it goes so much farther
than the facts. I think it goes into worldview and
it spills over into how it colors your lens and
(17:19):
your way of seeing the world and making sensive situations.
And when I let it spill into my view, I
was probably more successful at seeing and identifying recognizing the
warning signs of potential racism. But I think I just
no longer had the categories to not see potential racism.
(17:40):
I was no longer a possibility that maybe racism is
completely absent from the situation, maybe race isn't relevant here,
maybe I don't need to be vigilant right now. It
just eliminated that option entirely, and it always put I
think racism is a threat. It always put that option
on the table, which really wears on you. It's obviously
(18:03):
a good thing if it's true, and racism truly is
always a threat, and even while meaning people are just
as racist because there is this hidden prejudice called implicit bias.
If all of that is true and correct, then it
probably is good that it reminds you to put on
your armor and always be on guard against racism. However,
if it's not completely and totally true, then that vigilance itself,
(18:27):
that fear itself, that constant worry, constant anticipation that becomes
a problem in itself, and I think the latter option
is probably more true, at least in my case. So
now let's talk about how I flipped and became very
unconvinced of implicit bias. How I went from believing that
(18:50):
this hidden prejudice is at work in people's minds for everyone, everywhere,
all the time, to believing the opposite, implicit bias is
not a real it's not a true thing. And remember,
after I explain how I became very unconvinced, that's not
where I'm at now. I'm in a lot more of
a gray area. I'm in between. I think that there
(19:12):
is some truth to the concept of implicit bias, and
there is also some truth to the critiques of implicit bias,
and I just think all of the words have lost
their meaning and melted into this mush pot of misunderstanding.
But for a time I could say with my whole chest,
I don't think implicit bias is real. How did I
(19:34):
come to that belief? Well, I started looking into implicit bias,
and if I remember correctly, I think I was on
a mission to teach people about implicit bias and to
basically convince them of it. I might have been researching
for this very podcast like three years ago, and as
I researched the origins of implicit bias, and I wanted
(19:56):
to present the science and the data, immediately became unconvinced
of the science and the data, and I was like,
oh no, that I did not see coming. And so
it was this journey of a pretty drastic turnaround. Now
I'll explain that just off my noggin informally quickly. I
(20:20):
don't want to get bogged down into the weeds in
this episode because it would just run on way too long.
But here's a Marie version summary of the data and
how people came to the idea of implicit bias. So
in nineteen ninety eight, there were some researchers, I believe
from Harvard, and they came up with this bias measuring tool,
(20:42):
and I think that they had had versions for other
kinds of bias. So they had measured maybe gender bias
or age biases, and they had a race bias version. Now,
this bias test is known as the IA or the
implicit association test, and they present it in the years
like nineteen ninety eight, maybe it was two thousand. They
(21:03):
published a book about it shortly after it got referenced
in so many other published works. Immediately it took off
like wildfire because everyone was mind blown that they could
create this little tool that would measure implicit bias, which
is supposed to be hidden and impossible to dig up.
They had this little computer test that dug it up.
(21:24):
And what was so powerful about it was it gave
something concrete to implicit bias. We've always said it's hidden
and you don't know what its effects are, and so
there wasn't much talk of it in the mainstream. It
was kind of confined to academia, because what the heck
are you talking about a hidden psychological process that we're
not really sure what it is or who would affects
(21:44):
or how much it affects them. No, by instead saying
here's a little computer test, so you can see a
measure of yours. Now, boom, it's concrete, it's measurable, it's personal,
it's like hidden close to home. Even a big thing
was so many people in light of this test then
wrote in these confessional style articles of all this time,
(22:07):
I've thought of myself as egalitarian, but it turns out
I'm not. Here's the evidence. I can't deny it. This
is a big wake up call. And so it was
fact and I don't want to say fact and fiction
woven together, but at the very least it was. It
was fact and narrative. There was a factual element. Okay,
(22:28):
we can quantify this, but then there was such a
powerful storytelling element too of oh, it turns out that
I am racist. It turns out that I've been carrying
this with me all my life and I didn't know it.
So yeah, it was just that many people were personally
moved by implicit bias as a concept now being driven
so close to home. The way the computer exam worked.
(22:51):
If you're wondering, but maybe you're not. Maybe you're one
of the twenty plus million people who have taken the test.
It was this association timer type thing. So it would
show a black face, and it would show a white face,
and then it would also show positive adjectives, and it
would also show negative adjectives. And what they're wondering is
if when you match a black face and I don't
(23:13):
mean blackface, I mean a black person's face. If when
you match a black person's face with positive adjectives. Do
you have a quick reaction time or slow reaction time
compared to when you match a white person's face with
positive adjectives and same with negative adjectives. When you match
a black person with negative adjectives, is your reaction time
(23:35):
slower than when you'd match a white person with negative
adjectives or is it faster. It's kind of hard to explain,
but that was the basic premise, and it would measure
it down to like microseconds, And what they found is okay,
for so many people, they can associate a white face
and positive words faster then they can associate a black
(23:56):
face and positive words. And if they can associate a
black face and negative words faster than they can do
that with a white face, then that means they have
these biases. And the way that they reasoned that is
if seeing a white face and clicking on a positive word,
if that's a connection that your brain can make slightly
more quickly, then that's probably because at the subconscious level
(24:17):
those things match in your mind. Versus if it takes
a little while for you to match that positive adjective
with a black face, then maybe it's because you have
to first overcome the hurdle that you don't see those
things as associated, which means maybe you have these racially
prejudiced beliefs, which means maybe you have this hidden prejudice
that you would never be able to find out in
(24:38):
the real world, and that you would never know about,
and that you would never own up to because it's
not a conscious prejudice. It's not something you're willfully doing,
but it's at this subtle, subconscious level. That was the
basic idea of the IAT. So, like I said, it
took off like wildfire. Books were written about it, the
authors became very well known. Malcolm Ladwell wrote a whole
(25:01):
book about it, Blink, which you know, I'm sure was
one of his many best sellers. It came up in
the presidential debate stage. Hillary Clinton brought it up, and
it introduced implicit bias to the mainstream, this idea that
intending to be racist isn't necessarily the only thing that
makes a person racist. There are other things going on
(25:23):
in your psychology that might make you racist. And it
all came back to this test. I can't stress that enough.
Where do we get the term implicit bias? How did
it become part of popular culture? How did it become
something that we've all heard of. What is everyone referencing
in academia? What is the science that everyone's pointing to.
It all comes back to the IAT and these researchers.
(25:46):
So that's the background of the science that I was uncovering.
And I was going, Oh, that's flimsier than I thought
about implicit bias, Okay, And then I started to read
more about this implicit association. And if I recommended one long,
but big, swinging article, it would be the article published
(26:07):
in The Cut titled Psychology's Favorite racism Measuring tool Isn't
up to the Job by Jesse Singhal. I'll say it again,
Psychology's favorite racism measuring tool is not up to the job.
It also gets a chapter in his book The Quick
Fix where he talks about fad psychology, and this is
one of his big case studies. But again, I'll just
(26:28):
summarize my takeaways as I was trying to learn about
the science of implicit bias, and I was gutted to
find so many flaws with that science. So I'll sum
up my findings from the time that left me in
a place of being like, oh wow, I don't believe
(26:49):
anything about implicit bias anymore. It is all a hoax,
It is all a sham. So, first of all, the
basic premise of the IAT is you would assume that
it's measuring your racial prejudice. You're getting the score this
rating essentially on how well you make these associations based
on race and the different faces and the different adjectives.
Do you have a positive view or a negative view?
(27:11):
But it's a leap between saying that you have like
a difference down to the thousandth of a second in
how you associate faces and then saying you act in
racist ways in the real world. Those aren't the same thing.
And basically many people's take away from this test, and
the creators initially claimed this is essentially giving you a
(27:34):
measure of your racism in the real world. It's telling
you your inclination to act in racist ways or make
racist decisions, have racism working in your mind, And then
later they had to walk back that claim entirely. They
then had to offer this disclaimer and say this test
actually measures nothing and it has no implications in your
real world behavior, which was confusing because what is prejudice
(28:02):
if not prejudiced beliefs? And prejudice behavior. And now the
creators were saying, Hey, we have this measure of prejudice.
In fact, we're the ones to measure prejudice, so we're
also the ones to define what prejudice is. We've defined it,
we've quantified it. Oh but by the way, this isn't prejudice.
It has nothing to do with your prejudice. Don't read
into these results. And the reason they had to walk
(28:23):
back their claims is because the whole scientific community, once
they have the time to see if this could be
replicated and to see if it's results were accurate, everyone
was pretty much like, yeah, no, that doesn't work to
the extent that you claim it works. So there's two
measures that are really important when it comes to psychological
(28:45):
instruments measuring tools, and you need validity and you need reliability.
Validity means is it valid is it measuring what we
think it's measuring? And then reliability is is it really liable?
Does it come up with consistent measures? Is a person
who is actually racist going to get a racist result
(29:07):
or would they get a racist result on Monday morning
and then a very different result on Tuesday morning? And
if they really are racist, then the result shouldn't change
from one day to another. You can't change all that much,
so you would hope that the results would be reliable.
And this test didn't pass those measures. It was not
(29:27):
found to be valid nor reliable. And there were just
other things that got in the way. Like I remember
I read a different article. It was about how like
our most revered black leaders, it might have been MLK,
or it might have been Jesse Owens or some famous
black figure, and they explained, here's why that person wouldn't
(29:49):
have passed the IAT, Here's why that person, let's say
it was MLK, wouldn't have gotten a non racist result.
And they are basically saying the IET isn't measuring someone's prejudice,
meaning their beliefs or behavior related to racial inequality, racial malice, whatever.
It's measuring associations. And so someone like MLK, he was
(30:12):
very exposed to stereotyping, and he was very exposed to
associations of black and bad or white and good. He
lived through segregation. This is obvious. And what they were
saying is a key error with the IAT is it
can't distinguish between the people who are just aware of stereotypes,
(30:32):
which they clearly don't believe in themselves and people who
have been susceptible to those stereotypes and come to internalize them.
So someone like MLK, you can't say, yeah, well he
actually is prejudiced if it would take him longer to
make those associations on the IAT, No he's not. If
MLK it turns out that a computer test tells us
(30:54):
he's super racist, then I think the computer test is broken.
I think we've lost the plot. We've lost our grasp
of what we mean by racist, because now the word
comes to mean nothing. A proper test of racism or
hidden prejudice, it should measure just that it needs to
isolate prejudice or malice in your inclination to discriminate, not
(31:17):
how familiar you are with the fact that stereotypes that
are negative are often lumped with African Americans. And people
were like, yeah, we think that this test is doing that.
You might get a score on the test that's like, oh,
you're really prejudiced, But it doesn't necessarily mean that you've
believed those things or you've bought into those associations, but
(31:37):
simply that you've just been surrounded by them. And so
there are a number of reasons that the test was
just thoroughly disproven. It crumbled and I came to see, Okay,
this is bad psychology. I think that this is pseudoscience.
I think that this isn't trustworthy, it's not reliable. Can
I set this aside and still believe in implicit bias
(31:58):
as the term key concept that makes sense of everything?
And the answer I came to was no. Because implicit
bias was birthed from the implicit association test. It came
to take its meaning from that test, and so it's
really hard to hold on to the concept itself, that
(32:19):
such a flawed test to create it, and be able
to say, Okay, the test is wrong, but everything that
it hypothesized about implicit bias and our hidden prejudices, I
still think that's all right. I couldn't say that anymore.
I just had to admit, Okay, I think that implicit bias,
if it's real, it is not what I thought it
(32:39):
was at all. And I don't think it's as far
reaching as I thought it was. And I don't think
that all of our talk about it being like poison
in the air we breathe, the water we drink, because
if you took this test, it would show you that
you're racist. I don't think that's all right anymore. I
think it needs a lot more groutin me, in which
(33:01):
case we're back to square one with whatever this is. Now.
I talked about the consequence of being super convinced of
implicit bias, and now I just explained here's how I
became unconvinced. When I think about the consequences of being like,
you know what, I don't think that's real. I don't
think that's true. I don't think that the science holds
(33:22):
up the consequence. I'd say for my life seemed a
lot better because no longer was I walking into a
neutral space and reading in that everyone there is racist.
Everyone there is set against me at the psychological level,
whether they realize it or not, and I have cold,
hard facts to prove it. Back when I that was
(33:45):
what I believed walking into a bank or a class
or my job, that was a hard way to live.
So now when I was like, oh, whoa, those evil
gears that I thought were turning in everyone's mind, maybe
that's not so true. Maybe people aren't being being dominated
and controlled by an autonomous racist evil, that felt like
(34:06):
really good news. It was really good news. I shouldn't
understate it. It was really good news. Such a relief,
And now that I didn't have this trump card of
well but they have this implicit bias, I was able
to see neutral situations as neutral again, because, like I
said before, it seemed irresponsible to not consider how subtle
(34:32):
prejudice might be shaping every single social interaction I had,
or every room I walked into or everywhere that I
should manage my reputation, manage like my impressions, be on
guard for if I'll be discriminated against. I felt that
I had to do that, why because of implicit bias,
because it's always working. But now that I had heard okay,
(34:54):
the research kind of fell apart and the bubble burst
for me, and I realized, Okay, we aren't all brainwashed.
We aren't all rotten or poisoned or irredeemably racist or
whatever language you want to use. I was like, Okay,
that's good. I'm relieved. I wasn't looking for that answer.
(35:15):
I was actually trying to prove the opposite. But I
was glad to stumble on that answer. But then I
just landed for a while at okay, implicit bias. It's
not real. It's not real at all. I don't know
why I believed it was so real. Well, I know
why I believed it, But it was more of a
story than a fact, and it was more of the
narrative I was believing before I dug into the science.
(35:36):
But then the science didn't support the narrative, and the
narrative just became too big for its breeches. And I
was looking back at the journey and just like, yeah,
I don't agree with that anymore. And then what happened.
What do you think happened? Well, it's what always happens
with me, which is I changed my mind over time.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
I gradually felt like my bold declarations that implicit bias
is so totally wrong just weren't entirely true.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Because it's more great than that. I think that implicit
bias has some validity, and a lot more validity than
skeptics would give it. I think it's more legit than
some people say it is. But on the other hand,
for people who are implicit bias groupies, and they completely
are convinced, and they completely say it's cold, hard facts
(36:31):
and it's what the science says, and it's indisputable. I
think it's a little less sturdy than those people seem
to think it is. It's in between. It's not everything,
but it's not nothing. It's not totally true, it's not
totally false. That's where I've drifted in the time since
I last spoke on this. I think last time I
talked about it publicly, I was more ready to say,
(36:54):
it is totally false. Isn't that good news? We can
resume the program and stop hurling accusations at people with
this trump card of your racist. I know your racist.
How do I know it? Well, it has nothing to
do with you, and it has everything to do with science,
and you can't argue otherwise. I was ready to say,
let's be done with all of that, and let's lay
(37:15):
this conversation to rest. But I honestly think that there
is truth to simplicit bias. But it's just so complicated
that the thing that made that term mean what it
means is really wrong. I'm still not convinced of the
legitimacy of the IAT, and I'm still concerned that the
IET is what birthed the concept of implicit prejudice. You
(37:39):
might want to reach out to me and Saint Marie.
Actually there's a whole field of study apart from the IT.
And actually there's a whole lot of research apart from
the IAT, and it's been established in these other ways,
And I get that. What I'm saying is that how
we make sense of it, how we all conceptualize it,
comes from this language which was really pie and it
(38:00):
was really grand claims. It was really, you have this
hidden evil, you're brainwashed, you don't know it, you can't
control it, you'll never see it, but it's there. And
even though I think that there is such a thing
as hidden prejudice or implicit bias, unconscious prejudice, whatever you
want to call it, I do believe that it's real
(38:20):
and true. I feel like I'm talking about Santa Claus.
I believe, do you believe? But I'm convinced that that's
a true concept which has a place, it has facts
to back it up. But I just think it's so
hard to divorce what is true of that concept from
all that has been overstated about that concept, if that
(38:43):
makes sense. So I'm in this gray area now where
I'm like, yeah, I'm not on board with how a
lot of people talk about implicities. I'm not on board
with us talking about it like it's brainwashing, like it's
controlling us, like it's in the air we breathe. I'm
not on board with the analogies, the metaphors, and just
the grandia of statements that it turns out everyone's racist,
(39:03):
and it turns out that if they say they aren't,
they're wrong, and if they act like they aren't, that
doesn't matter, and no matter what they do, they're still
super racist. I don't think that makes sense. I think
that there is such a thing as hidden prejudice or
unconscious bias. There is such a thing as being racist
and not intending to be, having in group preferences that
(39:25):
you didn't intend to have, or having a pattern of
discrimination or omission. I think all of that happens, and
it happens apart from conscious intents. It happens apart from
willful racism. But the line that I draw that I
think is so important is even if we're talking about
(39:46):
hidden prejudice, we have to mean something by the word prejudice.
We can't just say that everyone has hidden prejudice in
equal measure, everyone has this dose of prejudice waiting out
in their brain. It's this programming just waiting to be activated.
I don't think that maintains the meaning of prejudice or racism.
(40:06):
Prejudice has to mean, how do I put this prejudice.
It has to mean viewing people differently because of their race,
having assumptions because of race, treating people differently because of race.
Prejudice and discrimination together. It has to have a real consequence,
a real world consequence, and the real world consequence could
(40:27):
stay in your brain. It could be you think this
thought about that person because of their race, that's prejudice,
or you made this decision about that person because of
their race, that's discrimination. And those things might happen apart
from your conscious fulfill effort, so that would be considered
hidden prejudice unconscious bias. In my book, there is such
(40:48):
a thing as that. What I am just so so
particular about is when people talk about hidden prejudice as
if it's a thing that's brainwashing you all the time,
controlling you all the time, pulling the puppet strings in
your mind. Whether you're acting on it or not, that's
the problem to say, whether you act on it or not,
(41:09):
whether you give into it or not, whether you're swayed
by it or not, you're racist, you're prejudiced because it's
not whether or not. One of the big things from
that article that I mentioned earlier, the article titled Psychology's
favorite racism measuring tool Isn't up to the job is
he explains that for something to be prejudiced, it must
(41:30):
cause you to act in prejudiced ways, or it must
cause you to think in prejudice ways. It must be
a cause within effect. That is the definition of prejudice.
That is a prerequisite. And the issue with something like
the IAT or just the concept of implicit bias that's
come from it is that we think of prejudice as
(41:51):
something that can be, that can exist completely independent of
a cause or an effect or anything at all. We
just think it's just sort of there. It's pre low noted,
it's preset, and it's it's prejudice. That idea is what today.
I'm still I'm not about them. I'm not the uber
skeptic I once was where I was like, implicit bias
(42:13):
overall is a made up concept. No, I think it's real.
I think it's really real, But I think that my
conception of it is much more limited than the popular
thing that a lot of people mean when they say
implicit bias. If you mean everybody's racist, whether they act
on it or not, whether it shows up in their
thoughts or not, whether they devote their life to equality
(42:36):
efforts and racial justice or not. If you're saying that
all of those things are equally prejudiced, all of those
people are equally racist, I disagree, because then racism doesn't
mean anything, and no one could not be racist. That
would be an impossible feat. And what are we saying,
What is the point of that. That's why earlier when
(42:57):
I was talking about like, I actually really admit the
simplicity of the long standing definition of racism, which is
to say, or do or think a racist thing. That
simple definition that so many modern progressives like Robin D'Angelo
write off and say, oh, this was so oversimplified, and
they didn't realize the role of the unconscious, and they
didn't realize all of the passive things and all of
(43:19):
these other workings. I think it's great that we've all
become a lot more aware of the subtle happenings, but
I don't think we should write off the long standing
definition of racism that unites racism to racial prejudice, and
that unites prejudice to racism, that it actually says, this
is a real, concrete thing that some people are guilty
of and some people are less guilty of. I think
(43:42):
we need that kind of definition because this newer direction
that we've gone in since the IAT kind of taught
us to see things this way, where we say everyone's
racist and there's no way for anyone to be less racist.
It's just this permanent, fixed thing that just doesn't make sense.
(44:02):
And if that's what we hold to, then racism ceases
to mean anything. Racism ceases to be racism. Everyone's guilty,
even the people who shouldn't be considered guilty. I just
that's the one I don't like. I hope I've rambled
around that distinction long enough that you get what I'm saying.
I can even link at some of my past episodes
on implicit bias if you want to go back and
(44:23):
listen where I really teased out that idea, because I
still agree with my antiiait takes, and I still agree
with what I was saying about being thoroughly convinced of
implicit bias and unconvinced between being thoroughly convinced of it
and thoroughly unconvinced. I couldn't even say that I land
in one camp or the other. It's not that this day,
(44:45):
I'm very unconvinced. I'm definitely unconvinced if by that term
you mean the broad everyone is racist, no one is
non racist. Wishy washy. Now we've reduced the term to
mean nothing thing. Yeah, I don't agree with that. But
if I said, like, oh, I'm totally a skeptic and
I don't believe in hidden prejudice, that would be misleading
because I absolutely believe that people who don't intend to
(45:08):
be racists still say and think and do very racist things.
And if that's what we mean by hidden prejudice or
unconscious bias or implicit bias or whatever you want to
call it, then yet I am definitely a believer that
that is a thing and a problem today. But I've
been all over the board. I have a hard time
making up my mind. I don't feel like I fit
(45:30):
in the rigid categories, and I hope that with nuance, dialogue, discourse,
we can maybe create new ones, better categories, better ways
we make sense of things that have been far too
simplified and far too caricatured. That's my hope. I hope
you enjoyed this episode on why I can't make up
(45:52):
my mind about implicit bias. Thank you for your support.
This podcast, the essays I publish, all of the work
I do, would not be possible without you, paid supporters.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Until next time,
And then what happened. What do you think happened? Well,
it's what always happens with me, which is I've changed
my mind over time. Hello, and welcome back to the podcast.
On today's episode, I want to talk about why I
(00:22):
cannot make up my mind about implicit bias, or more accurately,
why I keep making up my mind about implicit bias
only to learn new information and then change my mind again.
I have made up my mind about implicit bias three
different times now. It's been a winding road, to say
the least. And you've probably heard me talk about implicit
(00:44):
bias maybe in years past, but I have very different
feelings about it these days. And I haven't shared this
full journey, this full arc I've been on, so I
think now's the time I'll talk through how I first
became very convinced of implicit bias when I got involved
(01:06):
with activism. I started to believe that there's this subtle prejudice,
this subtle racism, shaping every move we make. And I
was like, oh, my goodness, this is the key that
explains everything else. But then fast forward a little bit
I learned from skeptics of implicit bias skeptics of the
implicit association test, and I became so thoroughly unconvinced. I
(01:30):
was like, oh, my goodness, that's all a sham. I
see the evidence, and I see how implicit bias as
we make sense of it is totally made up. And
then fast forward another little bit, and where I'm at
now is much more of a gray zone. I am
neither fully convinced of implicit bias nor fully unconvinced. I've
(01:52):
been unconvinced of the unconvincing and now I'm just in
the middle. When I'm in the middle on something, I
usually shut up about it until I make up my
mind again. But if I did that, then where would
that leave all of you who are also in the
middle on things, and who also can't make up your
(02:13):
mind about things. Maybe it'd be helpful to hear someone's
journey when they're not in a spot where they've landed
firmly on one side or another, but they're just still
metabolizing all of the new bits and all of the information.
So that's the idea. This episode isn't meant to be
the most formal, the most intellectual review of implicit bias
(02:37):
ever to exist. It's more of my casual First I
thought this, and then I heard that, and then I
was like, oh, my goodness, but what about that thing
that's going to be our vibe? Okay, great, So let's
start at the beginning. When I first became very convinced
of implicit bias. In my earlier activism days, I learned
(02:59):
about implicit bias, and really, you always seem to be
taught about implicit bias in tandem with another key concept,
which is and he guesses systemic racism. At least that's
been my observation. And these two concepts, implicit bias systemic racism,
they're kind of presented to you as these twin issues.
(03:24):
They fit together to form this meta narrative which helps
you make sense of the world and helps you to see, oh,
my goodness, racism is working all the time, whether we
see it or not, and whether we intend for it
to be or not. And if we are passive, it's
still churning, it's still going. The beast of racism is
(03:45):
just lurking, it's crouching, it's prowling at the door, and
it doesn't take our active participation, our cooperation, our deliberate involvement.
It just happens. And so implicit bias is given to
you as this like key concept of how it just
happens in your mind, how racism is working even when
(04:07):
you don't know what's working. And then systemic racism is
the catch all term for saying, and here's how racism
happens in the world and how it's working even if
you don't know that it's working. So implicit bias and
systemic racism, I'm given both of them in the same sandwich.
And I'm taught a different view of racism than the
(04:30):
one that most of us grew up with. Most of
us when we were young believed that racism was mostly
intentional acts of malice, and racism was mostly executed by
bad actors. But then we get these very advanced psychological
concepts or sociological concepts, and it's like, well, think again. Racism,
(04:52):
it turns out, is autonomous, and it is present, and
it is growing whether you realize it or not, whether
you like like it or not, and whether you intend
for it or not. And it works at the individual
level through something called implicit bias. It's a hidden evil
that's living inside all of us, and at the grand scale,
(05:13):
it's working through something called systemic racism. And these are
the ways that racism has managed to live on even
though in today's day and age nobody claims to want
to be racist. That was kind of like the aha
new worldview that I put on when I first got
involved with activism, and so I became convinced that implicit
(05:33):
prejudice was always pulling the strings in people's minds, and
it had almost a mystical air about it. First of all,
it made so much sense because I knew for a
fact that many people aren't as moral as they intend
to be, or as moral as they claim to be.
(05:54):
You know, the guy who says I'm not sexist, but
is totally about to say something sexist, and he's totally
the most sexist person in the room. That's just how
it works. The people who are the most defensive, were
the most insistent that they aren't racist, are really just
the people who are in denial that they're kind of racist.
And that's what this whole implicit bias concept seem to
(06:17):
have this scientific backing and say, no, it really is
a fact. The people who don't think they're racist, they
always are. Everyone is, and the only difference is some
people acknowledge it and realize it and admit it, and
other people are in denial. And once you bring it
in from psychology and you're like, oh, wow, there's studies,
there's this test, there's this whole thing, you're like, it's
(06:40):
an irrefutable fact. So now, if you tell someone that
they are implicitly racist meaning and I should have defined
this term by implicit bias, I mean like hidden racism,
hidden prejudice. Now, at the first introduction to implicit bias,
when I was early in my activismy I thought of
(07:01):
it like a mystical thing because people would always use abstract,
non literal language to paint the picture. How many times
have we heard about implicit bias. That it's in the
air we breathe, it's like poison in the water we drink.
It's affecting all of us and we don't even realize it.
And they use all of these metaphors and analogies to
(07:24):
convey just how pervasive it is. But the more we
rely on those metaphors and analogies, the more we kind
of drift from any concrete understanding, like what is the
mechanism by which we all have this hidden racism. How
does that hidden racism show up? Does it have to
show up? Or if it doesn't show up, is it
still there? I think it's still there no matter what.
(07:45):
Is it still as bad? Though? If it's not showing up,
that seems like it's not as bad. And so I
didn't know for sure in concrete terms what the implications
of implicit bias were, but whatever they were, I knew
that they were huge. I felt like it kind of
rocked my world to have this discovery that everyone you
(08:07):
ever meet is racist and that goodwill, good intentions that's
not enough, or trying to become unracist, that's not enough.
And this idea of implicit racial bias is what leads
to the related idea, which is that we can't just
be non racist. We have to be anti racist because
racism is the default. So we need to counter the default.
(08:29):
We need to go above and beyond. And even then,
racism is this huge beast, is everywhere, It's in everyone.
And so the concept of implicit bias, when it really
sunk in for me, I would say, darkened my worldview considerably,
and it played into just a widespread mistrust or distrust
(08:53):
of people and white people specifically, because if you really
buy into it, not just in its most limited definition
or most specific and precise, concrete definition, but like I said,
there's a wider culture, a broader movement to embrace it
more as an idea and more as a metaphor and
an analogy for making sense of everything. And when you
(09:15):
do that, it just grows and grows and grows. So
you imagine that in every person you ever meet, every
person you ever walk by on the street, there are
these evil gears turning in their mind twenty four to
seven three sixty five. And that's pretty scary. That's quite
the uphill battle. That's a lot to deal with. And
then you also are convinced that nobody has the self
(09:37):
awareness to even realize that they have these evil gears turning.
Now it's going to be doubly hard to deal with
this evil that's crashing in against you from all sides,
from all people. And then because you believe that there
are these evil gears turning in their minds, you also
just get a pretty specific, narrow view of any situation,
(10:01):
which is that entering into literally any social situation, which
for me, it would be like a college classroom, or
my job at the time, or I remember specifically, I'd
walk into a bank and it would be all white
people in the bank, and I'd think, oh, my gosh,
it's all white people, and they all have that evil
in their minds. And I know that this is a
(10:22):
harmless experience. I don't think I'll be harmed, but like,
I'm not not afraid of being harmed. I know what
I'm up against, and I just remember how implicit bias
colored my view of everything, every situation, every room I
walked in. I'm not trying to caricature it. I'm just
trying to say, like it added gravity to contexts where
(10:44):
I knew I wouldn't probably be in harm's way, but
it added this like nagging voice of like, but you
might be because you never know, because you know that
evil is lurking in their minds and they don't even
know it. So you know, gear up for battle now.
Like I said, I didn't begin with this understanding of
(11:04):
implicit racial bias. None of us really did, because implicit
bias as a concept didn't even hit the scene until
the turn of the century, like around nineteen ninety eight
two thousand. That's when we all started to hear about
implicit bias, and so people in pretty much every generation
did not grow up with this notion that everyone is
automatically racist. I think maybe kids who are just growing
(11:28):
up today would be the first generation to hear that
idea from a young age, which worries me a little bit.
We'll get into that, but back at the beginning. It
goes without saying that when I was a child, I
did not believe that people carried around hidden race based prejudices.
I had a more typical or traditional concept of racism.
(11:52):
I believe that people who made race based judgments are racist,
and people who don't treat people equally are racist. I
knew that that was a concept, and I knew that
that was a category, but I figured that it was
a very small category, and it was something that was
more so belonging in the past, not my daily present.
(12:13):
I still experienced racism, and when I did, I'd be like, Wow,
somebody said a racist thing. That's strange because racism doesn't
belong here. And now, racism belongs in the past and
not the present. So I understood what racism was. I had,
sadly an early introduction to racism, but I had the
(12:33):
more simple, straightforward logical view, which is, a person is
racist if they decide to be racist, not A person
is racist, whether they realize it or not, and whether
they admit it or not. And maybe if they admit
it and they own up to it, that can make
them less racist. But really there's no way to undo it.
But they have to be anti racist to more than
cancel out their racism. But even when you do that,
(12:54):
you still can never do enough, and they'll always be
in this debt because they have a white socialization in
their white nones. All of that stuff obviously was not
in this brain when I was a child, And as
I'll explained throughout this episode, I have an admiration for
this simple, straightforward logical view because to this day in
(13:16):
progressive circles, I don't think we give enough credit to
that typical view of racism, that traditional, long standing view
of racism. And when we've introduced the concept of implicit
bias and we know so much and so little about
systemic racism, I'm not saying systemic racism is not real.
I could even do an episode later in the series
(13:37):
why I can't make up my mind about systemic racism
because I have such a love hate relationship with that term,
because I think it just plays into this thing of
causing so much confusion and disconnecting the actual problem racism, prejudice,
discrimination from our concept of it, because it's just this big, large,
abstract thing and we feel like it's everywhere, We feel
(13:59):
like it's crashing in on us, and it's routing the world,
but we can't actually boil it down into tangibles, and
so again, it just really darkens our worldview, maybe more
than it ought to. Not that these aren't real problems,
but just that maybe in our minds they shouldn't stay
such abstract problems. So anyway back to my being very
(14:22):
convinced of implicit and then I'll pivot and tell you
how I became very unconvinced. I think if I had
to choose one real practical issue with being deeply convinced
of implicit bias, it would be that implicit bias becomes
a trump card. Because if you believe that everyone is
(14:45):
probably racist and they just don't realize that they're racist,
and you believe loosely in something that you're like, well
it's scientific, it's science, implicit bias is science. Then you're
really convinced, and you can't be unconvinced that every person
you ever meet has these subtle prejudices, but they're hidden prejudices,
so you also can't exactly identify them. I think it
(15:07):
plays into what's become a norm within the social justice movement,
which is people often say, if it seems racist, it
is racist, or it might not be those words exactly,
but there's this general like you can be confident that
if you suspect anything, it is that bad thing, because
bad things are everywhere all the time, which in some
(15:28):
ways this is helpful to say that a lot of
the time you probably can make a correct assumption, your
hunch actually may be right, and so often racism doesn't
show up, like, Hi, I'm intending to be racist right now,
I'm intending to discriminate against you. This is my prejudice talking.
It doesn't announce itself, and so a lot is kind
(15:52):
of a gray area and it is left up to assumption. However,
when you just have this like Trump card loose pseudoscience
y thing, you don't actually know the science, you don't
actually know the studies, but you just know the concept
and the supposed conclusion, which is, oh, my goodness, it
turns out everyone is actually completely racist. That really sets
(16:13):
you over in your confidence of being able to conclude
that in any situation which might have been completely innocuous,
completely harmless, devoid of racism, you might walk away pretty
confident that the people there were racist towards you, or
can't be trusted, or just aren't safe, and you'd have
(16:34):
good reason to believe that, because you're carrying around this
like major abstract science y type belief that there is
an evil force that is acting upon you at all times,
and so having that kind of trump card, I think,
honestly for years gotten the way of me being able
to see a situation clearly or see it for what
(16:56):
it was. It definitely helped me to see potential racism
in situations. It's weird that I'm saying, like believed or
was convinced of implicit bias. It seems like something that's
a fact, you don't believe in it or not believe
in it. You aren't convinced or unconvinced it should be
something that just is. But it goes so much farther
than the facts. I think it goes into worldview and
it spills over into how it colors your lens and
(17:19):
your way of seeing the world and making sensive situations.
And when I let it spill into my view, I
was probably more successful at seeing and identifying recognizing the
warning signs of potential racism. But I think I just
no longer had the categories to not see potential racism.
(17:40):
I was no longer a possibility that maybe racism is
completely absent from the situation, maybe race isn't relevant here,
maybe I don't need to be vigilant right now. It
just eliminated that option entirely, and it always put I
think racism is a threat. It always put that option
on the table, which really wears on you. It's obviously
(18:03):
a good thing if it's true, and racism truly is
always a threat, and even while meaning people are just
as racist because there is this hidden prejudice called implicit bias.
If all of that is true and correct, then it
probably is good that it reminds you to put on
your armor and always be on guard against racism. However,
if it's not completely and totally true, then that vigilance itself,
(18:27):
that fear itself, that constant worry, constant anticipation that becomes
a problem in itself, and I think the latter option
is probably more true, at least in my case. So
now let's talk about how I flipped and became very
unconvinced of implicit bias. How I went from believing that
(18:50):
this hidden prejudice is at work in people's minds for everyone, everywhere,
all the time, to believing the opposite, implicit bias is
not a real it's not a true thing. And remember,
after I explain how I became very unconvinced, that's not
where I'm at now. I'm in a lot more of
a gray area. I'm in between. I think that there
(19:12):
is some truth to the concept of implicit bias, and
there is also some truth to the critiques of implicit bias,
and I just think all of the words have lost
their meaning and melted into this mush pot of misunderstanding.
But for a time I could say with my whole chest,
I don't think implicit bias is real. How did I
(19:34):
come to that belief? Well, I started looking into implicit bias,
and if I remember correctly, I think I was on
a mission to teach people about implicit bias and to
basically convince them of it. I might have been researching
for this very podcast like three years ago, and as
I researched the origins of implicit bias, and I wanted
(19:56):
to present the science and the data, immediately became unconvinced
of the science and the data, and I was like,
oh no, that I did not see coming. And so
it was this journey of a pretty drastic turnaround. Now
I'll explain that just off my noggin informally quickly. I
(20:20):
don't want to get bogged down into the weeds in
this episode because it would just run on way too long.
But here's a Marie version summary of the data and
how people came to the idea of implicit bias. So
in nineteen ninety eight, there were some researchers, I believe
from Harvard, and they came up with this bias measuring tool,
(20:42):
and I think that they had had versions for other
kinds of bias. So they had measured maybe gender bias
or age biases, and they had a race bias version. Now,
this bias test is known as the IA or the
implicit association test, and they present it in the years
like nineteen ninety eight, maybe it was two thousand. They
(21:03):
published a book about it shortly after it got referenced
in so many other published works. Immediately it took off
like wildfire because everyone was mind blown that they could
create this little tool that would measure implicit bias, which
is supposed to be hidden and impossible to dig up.
They had this little computer test that dug it up.
(21:24):
And what was so powerful about it was it gave
something concrete to implicit bias. We've always said it's hidden
and you don't know what its effects are, and so
there wasn't much talk of it in the mainstream. It
was kind of confined to academia, because what the heck
are you talking about a hidden psychological process that we're
not really sure what it is or who would affects
(21:44):
or how much it affects them. No, by instead saying
here's a little computer test, so you can see a
measure of yours. Now, boom, it's concrete, it's measurable, it's personal,
it's like hidden close to home. Even a big thing
was so many people in light of this test then
wrote in these confessional style articles of all this time,
(22:07):
I've thought of myself as egalitarian, but it turns out
I'm not. Here's the evidence. I can't deny it. This
is a big wake up call. And so it was
fact and I don't want to say fact and fiction
woven together, but at the very least it was. It
was fact and narrative. There was a factual element. Okay,
(22:28):
we can quantify this, but then there was such a
powerful storytelling element too of oh, it turns out that
I am racist. It turns out that I've been carrying
this with me all my life and I didn't know it.
So yeah, it was just that many people were personally
moved by implicit bias as a concept now being driven
so close to home. The way the computer exam worked.
(22:51):
If you're wondering, but maybe you're not. Maybe you're one
of the twenty plus million people who have taken the test.
It was this association timer type thing. So it would
show a black face, and it would show a white face,
and then it would also show positive adjectives, and it
would also show negative adjectives. And what they're wondering is
if when you match a black face and I don't
(23:13):
mean blackface, I mean a black person's face. If when
you match a black person's face with positive adjectives. Do
you have a quick reaction time or slow reaction time
compared to when you match a white person's face with
positive adjectives and same with negative adjectives. When you match
a black person with negative adjectives, is your reaction time
(23:35):
slower than when you'd match a white person with negative
adjectives or is it faster. It's kind of hard to explain,
but that was the basic premise, and it would measure
it down to like microseconds, And what they found is okay,
for so many people, they can associate a white face
and positive words faster then they can associate a black
(23:56):
face and positive words. And if they can associate a
black face and negative words faster than they can do
that with a white face, then that means they have
these biases. And the way that they reasoned that is
if seeing a white face and clicking on a positive word,
if that's a connection that your brain can make slightly
more quickly, then that's probably because at the subconscious level
(24:17):
those things match in your mind. Versus if it takes
a little while for you to match that positive adjective
with a black face, then maybe it's because you have
to first overcome the hurdle that you don't see those
things as associated, which means maybe you have these racially
prejudiced beliefs, which means maybe you have this hidden prejudice
that you would never be able to find out in
(24:38):
the real world, and that you would never know about,
and that you would never own up to because it's
not a conscious prejudice. It's not something you're willfully doing,
but it's at this subtle, subconscious level. That was the
basic idea of the IAT. So, like I said, it
took off like wildfire. Books were written about it, the
authors became very well known. Malcolm Ladwell wrote a whole
(25:01):
book about it, Blink, which you know, I'm sure was
one of his many best sellers. It came up in
the presidential debate stage. Hillary Clinton brought it up, and
it introduced implicit bias to the mainstream, this idea that
intending to be racist isn't necessarily the only thing that
makes a person racist. There are other things going on
(25:23):
in your psychology that might make you racist. And it
all came back to this test. I can't stress that enough.
Where do we get the term implicit bias? How did
it become part of popular culture? How did it become
something that we've all heard of. What is everyone referencing
in academia? What is the science that everyone's pointing to.
It all comes back to the IAT and these researchers.
(25:46):
So that's the background of the science that I was uncovering.
And I was going, Oh, that's flimsier than I thought
about implicit bias, Okay, And then I started to read
more about this implicit association. And if I recommended one long,
but big, swinging article, it would be the article published
(26:07):
in The Cut titled Psychology's Favorite racism Measuring tool Isn't
up to the Job by Jesse Singhal. I'll say it again,
Psychology's favorite racism measuring tool is not up to the job.
It also gets a chapter in his book The Quick
Fix where he talks about fad psychology, and this is
one of his big case studies. But again, I'll just
(26:28):
summarize my takeaways as I was trying to learn about
the science of implicit bias, and I was gutted to
find so many flaws with that science. So I'll sum
up my findings from the time that left me in
a place of being like, oh wow, I don't believe
(26:49):
anything about implicit bias anymore. It is all a hoax,
It is all a sham. So, first of all, the
basic premise of the IAT is you would assume that
it's measuring your racial prejudice. You're getting the score this
rating essentially on how well you make these associations based
on race and the different faces and the different adjectives.
Do you have a positive view or a negative view?
(27:11):
But it's a leap between saying that you have like
a difference down to the thousandth of a second in
how you associate faces and then saying you act in
racist ways in the real world. Those aren't the same thing.
And basically many people's take away from this test, and
the creators initially claimed this is essentially giving you a
(27:34):
measure of your racism in the real world. It's telling
you your inclination to act in racist ways or make
racist decisions, have racism working in your mind, And then
later they had to walk back that claim entirely. They
then had to offer this disclaimer and say this test
actually measures nothing and it has no implications in your
real world behavior, which was confusing because what is prejudice
(28:02):
if not prejudiced beliefs? And prejudice behavior. And now the
creators were saying, Hey, we have this measure of prejudice.
In fact, we're the ones to measure prejudice, so we're
also the ones to define what prejudice is. We've defined it,
we've quantified it. Oh but by the way, this isn't prejudice.
It has nothing to do with your prejudice. Don't read
into these results. And the reason they had to walk
(28:23):
back their claims is because the whole scientific community, once
they have the time to see if this could be
replicated and to see if it's results were accurate, everyone
was pretty much like, yeah, no, that doesn't work to
the extent that you claim it works. So there's two
measures that are really important when it comes to psychological
(28:45):
instruments measuring tools, and you need validity and you need reliability.
Validity means is it valid is it measuring what we
think it's measuring? And then reliability is is it really liable?
Does it come up with consistent measures? Is a person
who is actually racist going to get a racist result
(29:07):
or would they get a racist result on Monday morning
and then a very different result on Tuesday morning? And
if they really are racist, then the result shouldn't change
from one day to another. You can't change all that much,
so you would hope that the results would be reliable.
And this test didn't pass those measures. It was not
(29:27):
found to be valid nor reliable. And there were just
other things that got in the way. Like I remember
I read a different article. It was about how like
our most revered black leaders, it might have been MLK,
or it might have been Jesse Owens or some famous
black figure, and they explained, here's why that person wouldn't
(29:49):
have passed the IAT, Here's why that person, let's say
it was MLK, wouldn't have gotten a non racist result.
And they are basically saying the IET isn't measuring someone's prejudice,
meaning their beliefs or behavior related to racial inequality, racial malice, whatever.
It's measuring associations. And so someone like MLK, he was
(30:12):
very exposed to stereotyping, and he was very exposed to
associations of black and bad or white and good. He
lived through segregation. This is obvious. And what they were
saying is a key error with the IAT is it
can't distinguish between the people who are just aware of stereotypes,
(30:32):
which they clearly don't believe in themselves and people who
have been susceptible to those stereotypes and come to internalize them.
So someone like MLK, you can't say, yeah, well he
actually is prejudiced if it would take him longer to
make those associations on the IAT, No he's not. If
MLK it turns out that a computer test tells us
(30:54):
he's super racist, then I think the computer test is broken.
I think we've lost the plot. We've lost our grasp
of what we mean by racist, because now the word
comes to mean nothing. A proper test of racism or
hidden prejudice, it should measure just that it needs to
isolate prejudice or malice in your inclination to discriminate, not
(31:17):
how familiar you are with the fact that stereotypes that
are negative are often lumped with African Americans. And people
were like, yeah, we think that this test is doing that.
You might get a score on the test that's like, oh,
you're really prejudiced, But it doesn't necessarily mean that you've
believed those things or you've bought into those associations, but
(31:37):
simply that you've just been surrounded by them. And so
there are a number of reasons that the test was
just thoroughly disproven. It crumbled and I came to see, Okay,
this is bad psychology. I think that this is pseudoscience.
I think that this isn't trustworthy, it's not reliable. Can
I set this aside and still believe in implicit bias
(31:58):
as the term key concept that makes sense of everything?
And the answer I came to was no. Because implicit
bias was birthed from the implicit association test. It came
to take its meaning from that test, and so it's
really hard to hold on to the concept itself, that
(32:19):
such a flawed test to create it, and be able
to say, Okay, the test is wrong, but everything that
it hypothesized about implicit bias and our hidden prejudices, I
still think that's all right. I couldn't say that anymore.
I just had to admit, Okay, I think that implicit bias,
if it's real, it is not what I thought it
(32:39):
was at all. And I don't think it's as far
reaching as I thought it was. And I don't think
that all of our talk about it being like poison
in the air we breathe, the water we drink, because
if you took this test, it would show you that
you're racist. I don't think that's all right anymore. I
think it needs a lot more groutin me, in which
(33:01):
case we're back to square one with whatever this is. Now.
I talked about the consequence of being super convinced of
implicit bias, and now I just explained here's how I
became unconvinced. When I think about the consequences of being like,
you know what, I don't think that's real. I don't
think that's true. I don't think that the science holds
(33:22):
up the consequence. I'd say for my life seemed a
lot better because no longer was I walking into a
neutral space and reading in that everyone there is racist.
Everyone there is set against me at the psychological level,
whether they realize it or not, and I have cold,
hard facts to prove it. Back when I that was
(33:45):
what I believed walking into a bank or a class
or my job, that was a hard way to live.
So now when I was like, oh, whoa, those evil
gears that I thought were turning in everyone's mind, maybe
that's not so true. Maybe people aren't being being dominated
and controlled by an autonomous racist evil, that felt like
(34:06):
really good news. It was really good news. I shouldn't
understate it. It was really good news. Such a relief,
And now that I didn't have this trump card of
well but they have this implicit bias, I was able
to see neutral situations as neutral again, because, like I
said before, it seemed irresponsible to not consider how subtle
(34:32):
prejudice might be shaping every single social interaction I had,
or every room I walked into or everywhere that I
should manage my reputation, manage like my impressions, be on
guard for if I'll be discriminated against. I felt that
I had to do that, why because of implicit bias,
because it's always working. But now that I had heard okay,
(34:54):
the research kind of fell apart and the bubble burst
for me, and I realized, Okay, we aren't all brainwashed.
We aren't all rotten or poisoned or irredeemably racist or
whatever language you want to use. I was like, Okay,
that's good. I'm relieved. I wasn't looking for that answer.
(35:15):
I was actually trying to prove the opposite. But I
was glad to stumble on that answer. But then I
just landed for a while at okay, implicit bias. It's
not real. It's not real at all. I don't know
why I believed it was so real. Well, I know
why I believed it, But it was more of a
story than a fact, and it was more of the
narrative I was believing before I dug into the science.
(35:36):
But then the science didn't support the narrative, and the
narrative just became too big for its breeches. And I
was looking back at the journey and just like, yeah,
I don't agree with that anymore. And then what happened.
What do you think happened? Well, it's what always happens
with me, which is I changed my mind over time.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
I gradually felt like my bold declarations that implicit bias
is so totally wrong just weren't entirely true.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Because it's more great than that. I think that implicit
bias has some validity, and a lot more validity than
skeptics would give it. I think it's more legit than
some people say it is. But on the other hand,
for people who are implicit bias groupies, and they completely
are convinced, and they completely say it's cold, hard facts
(36:31):
and it's what the science says, and it's indisputable. I
think it's a little less sturdy than those people seem
to think it is. It's in between. It's not everything,
but it's not nothing. It's not totally true, it's not
totally false. That's where I've drifted in the time since
I last spoke on this. I think last time I
talked about it publicly, I was more ready to say,
(36:54):
it is totally false. Isn't that good news? We can
resume the program and stop hurling accusations at people with
this trump card of your racist. I know your racist.
How do I know it? Well, it has nothing to
do with you, and it has everything to do with science,
and you can't argue otherwise. I was ready to say,
let's be done with all of that, and let's lay
(37:15):
this conversation to rest. But I honestly think that there
is truth to simplicit bias. But it's just so complicated
that the thing that made that term mean what it
means is really wrong. I'm still not convinced of the
legitimacy of the IAT, and I'm still concerned that the
IET is what birthed the concept of implicit prejudice. You
(37:39):
might want to reach out to me and Saint Marie.
Actually there's a whole field of study apart from the IT.
And actually there's a whole lot of research apart from
the IAT, and it's been established in these other ways,
And I get that. What I'm saying is that how
we make sense of it, how we all conceptualize it,
comes from this language which was really pie and it
(38:00):
was really grand claims. It was really, you have this
hidden evil, you're brainwashed, you don't know it, you can't
control it, you'll never see it, but it's there. And
even though I think that there is such a thing
as hidden prejudice or implicit bias, unconscious prejudice, whatever you
want to call it, I do believe that it's real
(38:20):
and true. I feel like I'm talking about Santa Claus.
I believe, do you believe? But I'm convinced that that's
a true concept which has a place, it has facts
to back it up. But I just think it's so
hard to divorce what is true of that concept from
all that has been overstated about that concept, if that
(38:43):
makes sense. So I'm in this gray area now where
I'm like, yeah, I'm not on board with how a
lot of people talk about implicities. I'm not on board
with us talking about it like it's brainwashing, like it's
controlling us, like it's in the air we breathe. I'm
not on board with the analogies, the metaphors, and just
the grandia of statements that it turns out everyone's racist,
(39:03):
and it turns out that if they say they aren't,
they're wrong, and if they act like they aren't, that
doesn't matter, and no matter what they do, they're still
super racist. I don't think that makes sense. I think
that there is such a thing as hidden prejudice or
unconscious bias. There is such a thing as being racist
and not intending to be, having in group preferences that
(39:25):
you didn't intend to have, or having a pattern of
discrimination or omission. I think all of that happens, and
it happens apart from conscious intents. It happens apart from
willful racism. But the line that I draw that I
think is so important is even if we're talking about
(39:46):
hidden prejudice, we have to mean something by the word prejudice.
We can't just say that everyone has hidden prejudice in
equal measure, everyone has this dose of prejudice waiting out
in their brain. It's this programming just waiting to be activated.
I don't think that maintains the meaning of prejudice or racism.
(40:06):
Prejudice has to mean, how do I put this prejudice.
It has to mean viewing people differently because of their race,
having assumptions because of race, treating people differently because of race.
Prejudice and discrimination together. It has to have a real consequence,
a real world consequence, and the real world consequence could
(40:27):
stay in your brain. It could be you think this
thought about that person because of their race, that's prejudice,
or you made this decision about that person because of
their race, that's discrimination. And those things might happen apart
from your conscious fulfill effort, so that would be considered
hidden prejudice unconscious bias. In my book, there is such
(40:48):
a thing as that. What I am just so so
particular about is when people talk about hidden prejudice as
if it's a thing that's brainwashing you all the time,
controlling you all the time, pulling the puppet strings in
your mind. Whether you're acting on it or not, that's
the problem to say, whether you act on it or not,
(41:09):
whether you give into it or not, whether you're swayed
by it or not, you're racist, you're prejudiced because it's
not whether or not. One of the big things from
that article that I mentioned earlier, the article titled Psychology's
favorite racism measuring tool Isn't up to the job is
he explains that for something to be prejudiced, it must
(41:30):
cause you to act in prejudiced ways, or it must
cause you to think in prejudice ways. It must be
a cause within effect. That is the definition of prejudice.
That is a prerequisite. And the issue with something like
the IAT or just the concept of implicit bias that's
come from it is that we think of prejudice as
(41:51):
something that can be, that can exist completely independent of
a cause or an effect or anything at all. We
just think it's just sort of there. It's pre low noted,
it's preset, and it's it's prejudice. That idea is what today.
I'm still I'm not about them. I'm not the uber
skeptic I once was where I was like, implicit bias
(42:13):
overall is a made up concept. No, I think it's real.
I think it's really real, But I think that my
conception of it is much more limited than the popular
thing that a lot of people mean when they say
implicit bias. If you mean everybody's racist, whether they act
on it or not, whether it shows up in their
thoughts or not, whether they devote their life to equality
(42:36):
efforts and racial justice or not. If you're saying that
all of those things are equally prejudiced, all of those
people are equally racist, I disagree, because then racism doesn't
mean anything, and no one could not be racist. That
would be an impossible feat. And what are we saying,
What is the point of that. That's why earlier when
(42:57):
I was talking about like, I actually really admit the
simplicity of the long standing definition of racism, which is
to say, or do or think a racist thing. That
simple definition that so many modern progressives like Robin D'Angelo
write off and say, oh, this was so oversimplified, and
they didn't realize the role of the unconscious, and they
didn't realize all of the passive things and all of
(43:19):
these other workings. I think it's great that we've all
become a lot more aware of the subtle happenings, but
I don't think we should write off the long standing
definition of racism that unites racism to racial prejudice, and
that unites prejudice to racism, that it actually says, this
is a real, concrete thing that some people are guilty
of and some people are less guilty of. I think
(43:42):
we need that kind of definition because this newer direction
that we've gone in since the IAT kind of taught
us to see things this way, where we say everyone's
racist and there's no way for anyone to be less racist.
It's just this permanent, fixed thing that just doesn't make sense.
(44:02):
And if that's what we hold to, then racism ceases
to mean anything. Racism ceases to be racism. Everyone's guilty,
even the people who shouldn't be considered guilty. I just
that's the one I don't like. I hope I've rambled
around that distinction long enough that you get what I'm saying.
I can even link at some of my past episodes
on implicit bias if you want to go back and
(44:23):
listen where I really teased out that idea, because I
still agree with my antiiait takes, and I still agree
with what I was saying about being thoroughly convinced of
implicit bias and unconvinced between being thoroughly convinced of it
and thoroughly unconvinced. I couldn't even say that I land
in one camp or the other. It's not that this day,
(44:45):
I'm very unconvinced. I'm definitely unconvinced if by that term
you mean the broad everyone is racist, no one is
non racist. Wishy washy. Now we've reduced the term to
mean nothing thing. Yeah, I don't agree with that. But
if I said, like, oh, I'm totally a skeptic and
I don't believe in hidden prejudice, that would be misleading
because I absolutely believe that people who don't intend to
(45:08):
be racists still say and think and do very racist things.
And if that's what we mean by hidden prejudice or
unconscious bias or implicit bias or whatever you want to
call it, then yet I am definitely a believer that
that is a thing and a problem today. But I've
been all over the board. I have a hard time
making up my mind. I don't feel like I fit
(45:30):
in the rigid categories, and I hope that with nuance, dialogue, discourse,
we can maybe create new ones, better categories, better ways
we make sense of things that have been far too
simplified and far too caricatured. That's my hope. I hope
you enjoyed this episode on why I can't make up
(45:52):
my mind about implicit bias. Thank you for your support.
This podcast, the essays I publish, all of the work
I do, would not be possible without you, paid supporters.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Until next time,
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