Community Relations Services Toolkit for Policing
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Understanding Bias: A Resource Guide page 2
new encounters. Our brains take pieces of information associated with familiar objects, sort it according
to the schemas, and respond according to how we have been trained to react to that category.
When these schemas are used to categorize people by age, gender, race, or other criteria, they are
called stereotypes.
This term is not necessarily a negative concept; the brain is sorting new people into
easily recognizable groups. For example, a stereotype may consist of “elderly people,” or “people who
went to the same school that I attended.” Attitudes, on the other hand, are positive or negative feelings
and attributes towards a person or a thing.
Implicit bias involves both implicit stereotypes and implicit
attitudes. These stereotypes and attitudes are shaped by personal experiences and cultural exposure
that leave a recorded imprint on our memory.
Explicit vs. Implicit Bias
Explicit bias is the traditional conceptualization of bias. With explicit bias, individuals are aware of their
prejudices and attitudes toward certain groups.
for a particular group
are conscious. Overt racism and racist comments are examples of explicit biases.
Implicit bias involves all of the subconscious feelings, perceptions, attitudes, and stereotypes that have
developed as a result of prior influences and imprints. It is an automatic positive or negative preference
for a group, based on one’s subconscious thoughts. However, implicit bias does not require animus; it
only requires knowledge of a stereotype to produce discriminatory actions.
Implicit bias can be just as
problematic as explicit bias, because both may produce discriminatory behavior. With implicit bias, the
individual may be unaware that biases, rather than the facts of a situation, are driving his or her
decision-making.
In policing, for example, implicit bias might lead police officers to automatically be suspicious of two
young Hispanic males driving in a neighborhood where few Hispanics live. Implicit bias might actually
endanger officers; for example, if officers have an implicit bias based on gender, they might be “under-
vigilant” with women and miss clues suggesting that a particular woman may be dangerous.
Although everyone has implicit biases, research shows that
implicit biases can be reduced through the
very process of discussing them and recognizing them for what they are.
Once recognized, implicit biases
can be reduced or “managed,” and individuals can control the likelihood that these biases will affect
their behavior. Unconscious negative bias toward a particular group also can be reduced through
positive contacts with members of that group, and through “counter-stereotyping,” in which individuals
are exposed to information that is the opposite of the stereotypes they have about a group.
http://www.indiana.edu/~p1013447/dictionary/
ctrlauto.htm
4. “The Lens of Implicit Bias”
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
8. Lorie Fridell, “This Is Not Your Grandparents’ Prejudice: The Implications of the Modern Science of Bias for Police
Training,”
Translational Criminology
,
Fall 2013: 10-11.
9. Devine, P. G., Forscher, P. S., Austin, A. J., and Cox, W. T. L. (2012). Long-term reduction in implicit race bias: A
prejudice habit breaking intervention.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,
48, 1267-1278.
10. Fridell (2013, 10)
11. See for example, Devine (2012); Correll, J., Park, B., Judd, C. M., Wittenbrink, B., Sadler, M. S., and Keesee, T. (2007).
Across the thin blue line: Police officers and racial bias in the decision to shoot.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
92(6), 1006-1023; and Kawakami, K., Dovidio, J. F., Moll, J., Hermsen, S., Russin, A. (2009). Just say no (to stereotyping):
Effects of training in the negation of stereotypic associations on stereotype activation.
Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology
78(5), 871-888.; as discussed in Fridell (2013).