In a recent blog post on the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog, writer Kay Hymowitz erroneously stated that “implicit bias—assuming there is such a thing, and that we know how to measure it—has no clear real-life consequences.”
Sorry, Ms. Hymowitz, but that is simply false. Implicit bias most certainly does exist, and it has some very significant and often severe real-life consequences.
You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in psychology to have been exposed to the overwhelming evidence that implicit bias exists in our society. I would argue that just being an empathetic and observant person is enough to make implicit bias obvious in our day-to-day lives. In fact, one can simply turn to the front page of just about any newspaper to see implicit bias play out in instances of police brutality against communities of color and blatant Islamophobia plaguing communities throughout the country.
But aside from anecdotal evidence, there is also an abundance of hard data affirming the existence of implicit bias.
Ms. Hymowitz’s critique of implicit bias was based on a Yale study performed in preschool classrooms, in which they concluded that implicit bias led preschool teachers to more closely track black students, especially black boys, from whom they expected more challenging behaviors. Regardless of whether this study was flawed (as Hymnowitz argues), there is extensive literature showing the existence of implicit bias in nearly all human interactions, including educational settings.
A great primer on the universality of this well-established psychological phenomenon is Harvard University’s Project Implicit. Researchers involved with this project and other studies of implicit bias have found ways to measure implicit bias by measuring one’s ability to make associations between a personal characteristics (race, gender, sexuality, etc.) and an evaluation (e.g., positive or negative adjectives) or stereotype. An implicit bias reveals itself, for example, when people are faster to categorize a White face with a positive adjective or vice versa.
Everyone should take this quiz because it is a great eye-opener for those who think they are free of implicit bias and are able to evaluate all people equally. For those who acknowledge the reality of implicit bias, it is yet another a reminder that there are unconscious forces at work in all of us that we must actively push back against in order to avoid biased behavior.
In an educational environment, the real-life consequences of implicit bias for students of color are abundant. Teachers hold students of color to lower academic expectations, which have a tendency to become a self-fulfilling prophecy for many students. Students of color also experience disproportionate suspension and expulsion rates and are less likely to be selected for gifted and talented programs. In college, professors are less responsive to inquiries from students of color and implicit bias can influence the grades professors give students whose work is identical.
But the consequences certainly don’t stop in the classroom. Implicit bias also affects hiring decisions and who gets a job. In one of the most jarring papers on this topic, black applicants without a criminal record interviewing for a job were about as likely to be called back as white applicants with a criminal record but with an otherwise identical resume.
Sometimes the consequences of implicit bias are a matter of safety or even life and death. People of color are more likely to be searched during routine traffic stops even though police were less likely to find something; more likely to be subjected to “stop and frisk”; more likely to be imprisoned than white defendants convicted of the same crime; and more likely to be killed by the police when unarmed.
It’s dangerous to deny the existence of implicit bias. Such denial only serves to worsen many of the negative outcomes associated with implicit bias, with potentially dire consequences for people of color. Given the amount of existing research, it’s time for experts to stop questioning its reality. Instead, experts must acknowledge and work to combat implicit bias in order to continue striving to live up to our nation’s ideals of justice and equality for all.
Lisette Partelow is director of teacher policy at the Center for American Progress.
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in U.S. News & World Report.