The phase 2 response times are typically far greater than those for phase 1: perhaps three-fourths of a second per word, as opposed to just half a second. To understand why, let’s look at this as a task in sorting. You are being asked to consider four categories of objects: male names, male relatives, female names, and female relatives. But these are not independent categories. The categories male names and male relatives are associated—they both refer to males. Likewise, the categories female names and female relatives are associated. In phase 1 you are asked to label the four categories in a manner consistent with that association—to label all males in the same manner, and all females in the same manner. In phase 2, however, you are asked to ignore your association, to label males one way if you see a name but the other way if you see a relative, and to also label female terms differently depending upon whether the term is a name or a relative. That is complicated, and the complexity eats up mental resources, slowing you down.
That is the crux of the IAT: when the labeling you are asked to do follows your mental associations, it speeds you up, but when it mixes across associations, it slows you down. As a result, by examining the difference in speed between the two ways you are asked to label, researchers can probe how strongly a person associates traits with a social category.
For example, suppose that instead of words denoting male and female relatives, I showed you terms related to either science or the arts. If you had no mental association linking men and science or women and the arts, it wouldn’t matter if you had to say “hello” for men’s names and science terms and “good-bye” for women’s names and arts terms, or “hello” for men’s names and arts terms and “good-bye” for women’s names and science terms. Hence there would be no difference between phase 1 and phase 2. But if you had strong associations linking women and the arts and linking men and science—as most people do—the exercise would be very similar to the original task, with male and female relatives and male and female names, and there would be a considerable difference in your response times in phase 1 and phase 2.
When researchers administer tests analogous to this, the results are stunning. For example, they find that about half the public shows a strong or moderate bias toward associating men with science and women with the arts, whether they are aware of such links or not. In fact, there is little correlation between the IAT results and measures of “explicit,” or conscious, gender bias, such as self-reports or attitude questionnaires. Similarly, researchers have shown subjects images of white faces, black faces, hostile words (awful, failure, evil, nasty, and so on), and positive words (peace, joy, love, happy, and so on). If you have pro-white and anti-black associations, it will take you longer to sort words and images when you have to connect positive words to the black category and hostile words to the white category than when black faces and hostile words go in the same bin. About 70 percent of those who have taken the test exhibit this pro-white association, including many who are (consciously) appalled at learning that they hold such attitudes. Even many black people, it turns out, exhibit an unconscious pro-white bias on the IAT. It is difficult not to when you live in a culture that embodies negative stereotypes about African Americans.
Though your evaluation of another person may feel rational and deliberate, it is heavily informed by automatic, unconscious processes—the kind of emotion-regulating processes carried out within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. In fact, damage to the VMPC has been shown to eliminate unconscious gender stereotyping.18 As Walter Lippmann recognized, we can’t avoid mentally absorbing the categories defined by the society in which we live. They permeate the news, television programming, films, all aspects of our culture. And because our brains naturally categorize, we are vulnerable to acting on the attitudes those categories represent. But before you recommend incorporating VMPC obliteration into your company’s management training course, remember that the propensity to categorize, even to categorize people, is for the most part a blessing. It allows us to understand the difference between a bus driver and a bus passenger, a store clerk and a customer, a receptionist and a physician, a maître d’ and a waiter, and all the other strangers we interact with, without our having to pause and consciously puzzle out everyone’s role anew during each encounter. The challenge is not how to stop categorizing but how to become aware of when we do it in ways that prevent us from being able to see individual people for who they really are.
THE PSYCHOLOGY PIONEER Gordon Allport wrote that categories saturate all that they contain with the same “ideational and emotional flavor.”19 As evidence of that, he cited a 1948 experiment in which a Canadian social scientist wrote to 100 different resorts that had advertised in newspapers around the holidays.20 The scientist drafted two letters to each resort, requesting accommodations on the same date. He signed one letter with the name “Mr. Lockwood” and the other with the name “Mr. Greenberg.” Mr. Lockwood received a reply with an offer of accommodations from 95 of the resorts. Mr. Greenberg received such a reply from just 36. The decisions to spurn Mr. Greenberg were obviously not made on Mr. Greenberg’s own merits but on the religious category to which he presumably belonged.
Prejudging people according to a social category is a time-honored tradition, even among those who champion the underprivileged. Consider this quote by a famed advocate for equality:
Ours is one continued struggle against degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the European, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir [black African] … whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with, and then pass his life in indolence and nakedness.21
That was Mahatma Gandhi. Or consider the words of Che Guevara, a revolutionary who, according to Time magazine, left his native land “to pursue the emancipation of the poor of the earth” and helped overthrow the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.22 What did this Marxist champion of poor oppressed Cubans think of the poor blacks in the United States? He said, “The Negro is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.”23 And how about this famous advocate for civil rights:
I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races … there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality … and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
That was Abraham Lincoln in a debate at Charlestown, Illinois, in 1858. He was incredibly progressive for his time but still believed that social, if not legal, categorization would forever endure. We’ve made progress. Today in many countries it is difficult to imagine a serious candidate for national political office voicing views such as Lincoln’s—or if he did, at least he wouldn’t be considered the pro–civil rights candidate. Today culture has evolved to the point where most people feel it is wrong to willfully cheat someone out of an opportunity because of character traits we infer from their category identity. But we are only beginning to come to grips with unconscious bias.
Unfortunately, if science has recognized unconscious stereotyping, the law has not. In the United States, for example, individuals claiming discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin must prove not only that they were treated differently but that the discrimination was purposeful. No doubt discrimination often is purposeful. There will always be people like the Utah employer who consciously discriminated against women and was quoted in court as having said, “Fucking women, I hate having fucking women in the office.”24 It is relatively easy to address discrimination by people who preach what they practice. The challenge science presents to the legal community is to move beyond that, to address the more difficult issue of unconscious discrimination, of bias that is subtle and hidden even from those who exercise it.