132: How implicit bias affects my child (Part 2)

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Do we really know what implicit bias is, and whether we have it? This is the second episode on our two-part series on implicit bias; the first part was an interview with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, former Dean of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and co-creator of the Implicit Association Test. But the body of research on this topic is large and quite complicated, and I couldn't possibly do it justice in one episode. There are a number of criticisms of the test which are worth examining, so we can get a better sense for whether implicit bias is really something we should be spending our time thinking about - or if our problems with explicit bias are big enough that we would do better to focus there first.

Jump to highlights:

• (03:38) Is implicit bias baked into our bodies?
• (06:27) About the Implicit Association Test (IAT)
• (08:13) Criticism of the IAT and Dr. Banaji’s response
• (12:48) Blindspot and the inception of the IAT
• (13:41) We make judgements about individuals based on how they look
• (14:12) We often say things that aren't true, even if we think we are truthful
• (16:01) The premise of the IAT and how it works
• (18:13) Conflicting definition of what implicit bias is
• (19:40) Meta-analysis of implicit bias
• (33:16) Implicit bias on the decline in recent years
• (35:37) The persistent problem with IAT
• (42:59) From macro-issues to the micro-issues of IAT
• (53:54) My takeways

Resources:

• Implicit Association Test

[accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen 00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We all want her children to lead fulfilling lives but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of Respectful Parenting. If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a FREE Guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What To Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us. Jen 00:59 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we start this week's episode, I wanted to take a minute to thank you for being a part of this parenting journey with me and to share a quick update on where things stand with the podcast after four and a half years now. What is that saying? The days are long and the years are short? It certainly seems to be the case here. And well for some of you listening, this may be the very first episode that you're listening to, there are many others who have been with me for the entire 132 plus episodes that I've created to date. We're close to surpassing a million and a half downloads from all around the world, and my goodness, it's a bit strange to even say those words aloud given that I started the show with basically no idea whether anyone would be interested in listening. And it's such an honor to me when you recommend the show to your friends and to other parents at your daycare or preschool. When you share specific episodes that have helped you to find the answers that work with your family and your online communities. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that developing Your Parenting Mojo, which is now the podcast episodes, blog posts, courses, workshops, membership content is more than a full-time job. I have a very small team that helps me to keep my own sanity and my husband is now involved as well. Maybe one day he'll even listen to as many episodes as some of my most dedicated listeners have. Even my daughter now signs off on her videos at home with the brought to you by YourParentingMojo.com. And as the word continues to spread, more and more parents are making transformative lasting change using the methods that we talked about here on the show. We are big cohort in the current Taming Your Triggers workshop who are supporting each other and understanding the sources of their triggered feelings. And just a week or two in they were already reporting the ability to create space for responses to their children that fit with their values, where that just hadn't seemed possible before. And I'm very happy to share that the Parenting Membership open enrollment is just around the corner and will run from May 2 through May 12 in time for celebrating Mother's Day, while the learning membership is going to reopen later in the summer. The community of parents that have already enrolled in the Parenting Membership continues to grow and it's a great resource of knowledge and support and community to help anyone who's looking to apply the ideas and strategies that you hear on the podcast in your own family at home. So I'll share more as we get closer to open enrollment. But for those of you who want to learn more or to join the waitlist, feel free to go to YourParentingMojo.com/ParentingMembership. And thanks again to each and every one of you who have joined me on this parenting journey over the last four and a half years. I learn and I grow every day as a parent and it's amazing to share all this with you. Jen 03:38 So let's get into our real topic of the day, which is part two of our miniseries on implicit bias. Today we're going to continue to open a real can of worms that's already half opened, and that I had no idea that I was about to open when I started researching this episode. So I've been interested in the connection between the brain and the body for some time now, and I'm planning a series of episodes to explore this topic in some depth. And one aspect of this is related to knowledge that we hold in our bodies rather than in our brains. And as I started to explore that idea, I was thinking about intuition, which we often experience as a felt sense in our bodies rather than a decision that we make in our brains. And that led me down a path toward understanding the role our gut plays in what we know. But another branch of this path led me to the topic of implicit bias because I was thinking, Okay, if we start relying on our brains a bit less and trusting our bodies a bit more, how can we know that this will lead us in a direction that's actually aligned with our values? What if implicit bias means that listening to our bodies actually takes us away from living our values because our bodies have implicit bias baked in so deeply? Jen 04:43 Now I've read the book Blind Spot: The Hidden Biases of Good People by doctors Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald some years ago, but I hadn't dug into the research behind it at the time. The book's premise is that we have visual blind spots, which are places where visual information is missing, but our brains fill in the gaps without us realizing it, which can be seen when a person whose visual cortex has been damaged and they can't see an object like a hammer in front of them, but if you ask them to reach out and grasp it, then they'll be able to do it. The author state that a parallel idea exists with non-visual stimuli as well, they say and I'm going to quote "Rather than an effective visual perception, this book focuses on another type of blind spot, one that contains a large set of biases and keeps them hidden just as patients who can't see a hammer can still act as if they do. Hidden biases are capable of guiding our behavior without our being aware of their role. What are the hidden biases of this book's title? They are for lack of a better term bits of knowledge about social groups. These bits of knowledge are stored in our brains because we encounter them so frequently in our cultural environments. Once lodged in our minds, hidden biases can influence our behavior towards members of particular social groups, but we remain oblivious to their influence. In this book, we aim to make clear why many scientists ourselves very much included, now recognize hidden bias blind spots as fully believable because of the sheer weight of scientific evidence that demands this conclusion. But convincing readers of this is no simple challenge. How can we show the existence of something in our own minds of which we remain completely unaware?" The book goes on to describe a test called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, which was designed by Dr. Greenwald and modified by both authors over the years, starting when Dr. Banaji was Dr. Greenwald’s graduate student. Jen 06:27 And so I'd known about what is the Race IAT for a number of years, there are actually now quite a few of them on topics ranging from age to religion to body weight. The landing page at implicit.harvard.edu, which is where these tests are housed, doesn't say much about the purpose of these tests. You have to click into the About the IAT page to see the description that "The IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts, for example, Black people, gay people, and evaluations, for example, good and bad, or stereotypes, for example, athletic or clumsy. The main idea is that making your responses easier when closely related items share the same response key, the IAT scores based on how long it takes a person on average, to sort the words in the third part of the IAT versus the fifth part of the IAT. We would say that one has an implicit preference for thin people relative to fat people if they are faster to categorize words, when thin people and good share a response key, and fat people and bad share a response key relative to the reverse." Jen 07:25 I think I’d even taken the Race IAT once before, a long time ago, which is the version of the test that most people assume you’re talking about when you mention the IAT. I don’t remember for sure what the result was but I assume it gave the result that it gives about 75% of people who take it, which is to say that they have implicit bias against Black people. Jen 07:44 I came back to the book again and poked around on both Dr. Banaji’s and Dr. Greenwald’s websites to see what they had been up to recently. I noticed that the most recent publication on Dr. Banaji’s website was co-authored with Dr. Yarrow Dunham, whom we met way back in episode 28 on how social groups form, which is linked to implicit bias. I emailed him and asked if he would be kind enough to introduce me to Dr. Banaji, which he was, and she quickly responded to say that while she was too swamped for an interview she’d be happy to answer three or four questions. So: so far, so good. Jen 08:13 Now, Pretty often when I reach out to researchers I’ve been able to get an overview of the concept and of their work but I haven’t yet done a deep dive, because if they say ‘no’ then I will have wasted several days of prep work as I’d have to find someone else to ask and then have to do a deep dive into *their* work. So after Dr. Banaji agreed to answer some questions I reread Blindspot, and thirty peer-reviewed papers on implicit bias, and some really well-written articles in the popular press (and some not so well-written ones as well), and then things got a bit difficult. I want to give a special shout-out to journalist Jesse Singal, who wrote a really excellent piece on the topic of the research behind the IAT in an online magazine called The Cut. I had it open in my browser for a while as I was digging into the peer-reviewed literature and when I finally came back to it I found he had already coalesced a number of the thoughts that were swirling in my brain and had pointed to many of the studies I had by then found “by myself,” and directed me to a few more besides. He also reached out to a number of the researchers who have been involved in quite a drama of dueling analyses about the IAT which has played out in peer reviewed journals over the last decade or so (dramas in the peer reviewed journal world tend to unfold in slow motion!). It’s been a drama because there seems to be a great deal of uncertainty about whether the IAT measures what it says it measures, and whether that has any practical significance in the real world. I ended up actually writing the majority of this episode’s content to try to explain to myself what this web of findings was, and I sent the text to Dr. Banaji along with some succinct questions and she responded that she had never met an interviewer who had done more in-depth preparation and would I like to talk? So I said yes, I very much would, and you’ve already heard the outcome of that interview in a recent episode, where hopefully you got a good grounding in what the IAT is and how it works. Jen 09:56 And we'll cover a bit more on that in a few minutes. But I have to say that I was highly hesitant to try to do anything that looked remotely like challenging the research on which the IAT sits because of something that appeared toward the end of Jessie Singal’s article in The Cut. He emailed Dr. Banaji with some questions about the kinds of methodological questions about the IAT that we’re going to look at in this episode, and he says she “repeatedly asserted that criticisms of the IAT come from a small group of reactionary researchers, and that questioning the IAT is not something normal, well-adjusted people do.” Jen 10:30 He goes on to quote her directly: “Of course it annoys people when a simple test that spits out two numbers produces this sort of attention, changes scientific practice, and appeals to ordinary people. Ordinary people who are not scared to know what may be in their minds. It scares people (fortunately a negligible minority) that learning about our minds may lead people to change their behavior so that their behavior may be more in line with their ideals and aspirations. The IAT scares people who say things like “look, the water fountains are desegregated, what’s your problem.” Jen 11:01 […] Jen 11:01 By and large I operate on the view that I need to pay attention to REAL criticisms of the IAT. Criticisms that come from people who are experts – that is[,] people who understand the science’s assumptions about response latency measures. People who do original work using such methods. I’m sorry to say this but we are all so far along in our work that I at least only read criticisms from people who are experts. I don’t read commentaries from non-experts. There’s too much interesting stuff to do and too many amazing people doing it for me to justify worrying about a small group of aggrieved individuals who think that Black people have it easy in American society and that the IAT work might make their lives easier. The IAT as you know is not about any one group, but this small group of critics ignore everything other than race, and it may be a good idea to find out why that may be the case.” Jen 11:47 Now, if you've been listening for a while, I’m sure you can see the red flags going off in my conflict-avoiding mind already – I’m not an expert; I don’t do original work in this area, and thus she wouldn’t read any commentary or criticism that I proposed, which is why I didn’t get into any of this in the conversation with her. So I want to be clear what we’re trying to do here. This is NOT an expose of the IAT, or of Dr. Banaji. I’m really grateful that she took the time to talk with me, and I’m grateful to Dr. Yarrow Dunham for connecting us. But I believe strongly enough that the interview we conducted doesn’t tell the whole story of the IAT that I’m going to try to dig more deeply on it here so we can understand whether implicit bias is really something we should pay attention to. Jen 12:28 So, in this episode my plan is to walk through what the research says about what implicit bias is, and how it’s measured, and why that’s important, and what implications this has for how we and our children interact with the world. I should mention that the research base on this topic is absolutely massive, and even what has now turned into two episodes isn’t really enough to do it justice. Jen 12:48 So our story starts with the creation of the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, and that story is told in Dr. Banaji and Greenwald’s book Blindspot. A substantial chunk of the book is about convincing you that you have blindspots – that you and I, just like everyone else, don’t perceive things in the way they actually happened. So, for example, if you’re on a jury in a murder trial where the defendant is accused of drunk driving, and an eyewitness says that the defendant staggered against a table and knocked a bowl to the floor as they left the party they were both at then you might believe the eye witness, but if the eye witness says “On his way out the door the defendant staggered against a serving table, knocking a bowl of guacamole dip to the floor and splattering guacamole on the white shag carpet,” you’ll be more convinced of the defendant’s guilt. Vivid details make information more memorable (which, incidentally, is why stories in children’s textbooks often contain little snippets of vivid detail – they make the material easier to remember, which helps the child pass the test more easily). Jen 13:41 We also make judgements about individuals based on how they look, and while we might think we’re pretty good at it we’re actually not researchers have asked research participants to judge the trustworthiness of people shown in photographs, they don’t do much better than chance at discriminating between Nobel Peace Prize recipients and criminals who have appeared on the TV show America’s Most Wanted. A lot of the time we make judgements about people based on what social group they are in, which is why Dr. Dunham’s work is relevant here – you might want to revisit episode 28 on how social groups form for a refresher on that. Jen 14:12 And then a chapter of Blindspot talks about how often we say things that aren’t true, even if we think we’re a pretty truthful person, such as the answers to the question “how are you?” which was a big cultural shock to me when I got to the U.S. because the person asking the question had often already walked by by the time I could even think about an answer, because they didn’t really want to know the answer to the question, which means the answer we give is pretty much irrelevant. We might lie and say we don’t have any cash on us when a person on the street asks us for money or tell a telemarketer that we aren’t home when we were the one who answered the phone. We may lie to the doctor when they ask how often we exercise, or how many drinks we have each day, or whether we’ve ever used illicit drugs. We try to manage the impressions that other people have of us,