A space to explore, share and shape the issues facing social and behavioral scientists
U.S. government-funded research that on its face looked only at fame, names and gender turned out to be pioneering work into implicit bias. This year a Golden Goose Award went to three researchers who developed the concept of implicit bias and then made a huge impact on popular culture by giving the world a test to measure it.
Prejudice and stereotypes are part of why social inequality persists. In many cases, people don’t know they have implicit biases that shape the norms of society that we see today. Although introspection is good it may not tell the full story, and that’s why social scientists use tests to measure the implicit biases people harbor and to see how much they relate to actions.
“The brain is an association-seeking machine,” Harvard social psychologist Mahzarin R. Banaji tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “It puts things together that repeatedly get paired in our experience. Implicit bias is just another word for capturing what those are when they concern social groups.
