SBP: Consequences of Attributing Discrimination to Implicit Bias

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Implicit bias training is being used by companies, police departments, and educational institutions to decrease discrimination based on race, gender, and other social categories and thereby to potentially help increase the diversity of their employees. By some estimates, diversity training costs nearly $8 billion a year, but there is little evidence that diversity training is effective at reducing discrimination. It is important to examine how people make sense of and respond to the many acts of discrimination that are attributed to implicit bias. Implicit biases are often thought to be beyond conscious awareness and recent research has found that people tend to hold those who discriminate less accountable if their discriminatory acts are assumed to stem from their implicit biases rather than explicit biases. Across fourteen studies, this project will discover for whom, when, and how this reduced accountability for discrimination attributed to implicit bias is most likely to occur. The project examines whether attributing discrimination to implicit bias affects the extent to which people think it is possible to overcome these forms of prejudice. The research also measures the emotions and behavioral consequences arising from these processes. The research will shed light on how increased awareness of implicit biases may actually produce reduced accountability for some acts of discrimination. The long-term aim of the project is to help produce more effective interventions to reduce societal discrimination. Many researchers and laypeople presume that educating the public about implicit bias will galvanize support to combat its discriminatory consequences. Yet there is reason to expect that greater awareness of implicit bias may actually reduce the extent to which people hold others accountable for acts of discrimination that are attributed to it. This project integrates research from moral cognition and social psychology to examine how people reason about and respond to reports of discriminatory behavior attributed to implicit attitudes. Specifically, this research investigates the hypothesis that because implicit processes are assumed to be beyond conscious awareness, people often hold those who discriminate less accountable for even clearly intentional behaviors when they are attributed to implicit attitudes and beliefs. The research will inform current models of moral responsibility and offer a reconsideration of the question of who is or should be responsible for implicit bias. This research will also consider additional outcomes of implicit bias attributions, including their effects on emotions, perceptions of discrimination, and willingness to work to combat discrimination and inequity. Because a great deal of discrimination is rooted in implicit forms of bias, a small but reliable reduced accountability for implicit bias effect could be highly consequential. The tendency to attribute discriminatory acts to implicit bias may paradoxically reduce the willingness to sanction those who discriminate, with the result of increasing rather than decreasing societal tolerance for discrimination and its effects. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.