Consequences of Implicit Bias Framing on Accountability for Discrimination

Onyeador Ivuoma N, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Jennifer Richeson at Yale University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating how attributing discrimination to implicit bias rather than explicit bias affects responses to acts of discrimination. Implicit biases are negative attitudes that can affect behavior outside of conscious awareness and explicit biases are negative attitudes that can affect behavior under full conscious awareness. Implicit bias is argued to be one explanation for the persistence of disparities despite the drop in explicitly negative attitudes toward many societal groups. As a result, a herculean effort has been exerted to raise awareness about implicit bias and claim it as the source of discriminatory outcomes across a variety of contexts. However, preliminary research suggests that attributing discrimination to implicit bias might undermine concerned responses to it. Understanding the consequences of attributing discrimination to implicit bias will be particularly useful for improving interventions designed to addressed societal inequality. The proposed research offers a multi-method approach to the study of the effects of implicit bias attribution on responses to discrimination. The overarching aim is to integrate insights from moral and intergroup psychology to examine the consequences of attributing group-based discrimination to implicit bias rather than to explicit bias and identify whether the consequences differ based on group membership. Specifically, this research (1) compares the effect of implicit bias attribution to explicit bias framing on dominant and subordinate group members' responses to discrimination that has already occurred; (2) extends the examination to vigilance for bias in recorded interactions, that is, as alleged discrimination unfolds, using eye-tracking; and (3) tests a potential intervention for the implicit bias attribution effect. The results of this research will add to our understanding of how people incorporate information about social psychological phenomena into the situations they encounter every day. In addition, the findings highlight the imperative to examine the way scientific findings are understood by the public. 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.