The Roots of Implicit Bias
even well-meaning people frequently harbor hidden prejudices against members of other racial groups.
.. Critics of this notion, however, protest what they see as a character smear — a suggestion that everybody, deep down, is racist. Vice President-elect Mike Pence has said that an “accusation of implicit bias” in cases where a white police officer shoots a black civilian serves to “demean law enforcement.” Writing in National Review, David French claimed that the concept of implicit bias lets people “indict entire communities as bigoted.”
.. But implicit bias is not about bigotry per se. As new research from our laboratory suggests, implicit bias is grounded in a basic human tendency to divide the social world into groups. In other words, what may appear as an example of tacit racism may actually be a manifestation of a broader propensity to think in terms of “us versus them” — a prejudice that can apply, say, to fans of a different sports team.
.. But we also found that people could overcome these biased instincts if they engaged in rational deliberation. When people had the chance to reflect on their decision, they were largely unbiased
.. We need not resign ourselves to a future of tribalism. On the contrary, our research suggests that people have the capacity to override their worst instincts