We are all prejudiced. You and me both

At the Institute for Futures Studies, we treat discrimination as an import issue for the future. We are studying how it manifests itself, but we are also trying to understand how and why discrimination arises. One way to do this is to study the individual and his/hers prejudices.

One way to measure the degree of racism in a society is to ask its residents if they would be willing to live next to neighbors of a different ethnicity than their own. In the World Values ​​Survey's latest round of interviews in Sweden, more than 97 percent of the respondents answered that the neighbors' ethnicity didn't not matter. Why is it then that we keep idenitifying cases of discrimination in Sweden based on ethnicity? One explanation that has been put forward it that we lie when we get this kind of questions. Another explanation is that we carry prejudices that we are unaware of but which still govern our behavior, a phenomenon known as implicit cognition.

Anandi Hattiangadi, Professor of Philosophy at Stockholm University, explains that implicit cognition is all we do and learn without being fully aware that we do it.

– Implicit cognition is cognition, or psychological activity, that is relatively unavailable to conscious introspection or self-report and is relatively difficult to control. Some examples include implicit bias with respect to gender or race, those are cases where people display biased behavior, say bias against African-americans in the United States or bias against women without being explicitly aware of doing that.

It is easy to say "this does not apply to me", but according to Anandi, there's just so much empirical evidence and so many different types of experiments saying the same thing, that it would be very difficult to justify denying that the phenomenon exist. The Implicit Association Test is one of the sources of data, it is available online for anyone who wants to learn about one's own implicit associations about race, gender, sexual orientation, and other topics. It has now been taken by hundreds of thousands of people and displays very consistent results; most of us have are biased in one way or another. If you are interested it trying the test, you can find it at Project Implicit.

- I think that a lot of the empirical information on implicit cognition suggest that we have very little or much less self-knowledge than we think we have. So people feel very strongly that they are authoritative about their own attitudes and that leads people to be relatively dismissive of the evidence of implicit bias when it’s not directly about themselves.

This lack of self-knowledge poses a problem because implicit biases can have the same consequences as conscious prejudices. Studies in Sweden show that applicants with Arabic-sounding names tend to get fewer calls to interviews than others. Other studies of Swedish courts have shown that defendants from Muslim countries or defendants with dark skin, tend to be judged more severely than other defendants, for the same type of crime.

Biases can be the result of many years of learning, some may even have evolutionary explanations. But there are experiments which have showed that prejudices can be created in a relatively short period of time.

- There is some evidence that we can, through training, counteract some of the biases. What seems to be very difficult is to be able to consciously control them, but it does seem that there are some ways in which people can be trained, over a longer term, to counteract some of their implicit biases. In fact I read in the paper that they are trying to train the American police to counteract some of their biases against African-American men.

Another way to counteract the consequences of biases is to organize our environment in such a way as to facilitate unbiased behavior. In hiring processes that could mean making cv's anonymous, or introducing check lists when making hiring decisions. Basically creating an infrastructure that helps us reduce biases and reduce the salience of bias. But in order to do this, we need to agree that this is a problem, and that's why more empirical studies of implicit bias are needed in Sweden, according to Anandi.

– A lot of this research has been done in the US and I often find that people say; 'well that’s the US, that doesn’t happen in Sweden'. I only know of a few experiments and a few kind of analyses of data in Sweden that confirm the hypothesis that these kinds of biases exist here as well. We need a lot more research, empirical research. into these matters in Sweden to convince people here, that we are implicitly biased as well. This is just a kind of extention of the not me-phenomenon, where people think this isn't happening in Sweden, 'maybe in the US you have that but not here, surely'.

In philosophy the research on implicit cognition includes the responsibility issue. Can I, as an individual, be responsible for my prejudiced actions if they are the result of biases that I do not know that I have? And what responsibility does society have to avoid consequences of biased behavior?

– I think that the question about whether we are individually responsible for biased behavior is a question that is connected to certain ethical questions about blameworthiness but also about moral character. I think the way the responsibility figures is in the question 'am I a bad person because I display these implicit biases?'. The thought is, well no if deep down you don’t endorse it, you’re not aware of it, you don’t control it, then you are not a bad person because you have these attitudes. The important ethical question is what are the consequences of this biased behavior, are they good or are they bad. Whether or not we think of ourselves as bad people as a result of being biased, I think many of us can agree that the consequences of this biased behavior can be bad overall for many people, and in that case, if we just think about the consequences of the behavior being worse than they would be if we were unbiased, then we can address the question of how we should go about changing the behavior, just because we agree that the consequences are not good, and not because we are inclined to say that people who display this behavior are bad people.

Implicit cognition is included as a research topic in the institute's current research program "Vilken framtid?" (Which future?). If you want to know more about implicit cognition, listen to the recordings from the two-day workshop "The Implicit Mind Workshop" that was held at the institute in May. The workshop was organized by Anandi Hattiangadi and Åsa Wikforss, professor of theoretical philosophy at Stockholm University. Find the recordings at IF Play. Right below you will find Anandi's talk from the workshop.