Amartya Sen argues that sectarian discord and violence are fueled by confusion about the nature of identity, including the pervasive tendency to see ourselves as members of singular social groups standing in opposition to other groups (e.g. Democrat vs. Republican, Muslim vs. Christian, etc.). Sen defends an alternative model of identity, according to which we all inevitably belong to a plurality of discrete identity groups (including ethnicities, classes, genders, races, religions, careers, hobbies, etc.) and are obligated to choose, in any given context, which among our multiple affiliations to prioritize. While Sen’s model of discrete identity prioritization is a clear advance over single-factor accounts, it overlooks significant lessons about identity from over 150 years of scholarship by feminists of color. In ignoring the experiences of women of color, Sen’s model falsely assumes that identities are in-principle separable for the purposes of practical deliberation; and, in obligating individuals to make such identity-based “reasoned choices,” Sen’s model forces those with multiply marginalized identities to choose from a set of externally defined identity options, none of which sufficiently captures their experiences.

Critical notice of Katherine Puddifoot’s (2021) How Stereotypes Deceive Us.

Kathy Puddifoot makes a compelling and enlightening case for a striking pair of claims: 1) false stereotypes sometimes steer us to the truth, while 2) true stereotypes often lead us into error. This is a wonderful book, a seamless integration of epistemology with ethics, of philosophy with social science, and of “mainstream” or “Western analytic” approaches with marginalized and underappreciated contributions from critical social traditions, especially black feminism. The integrations are so seamless, in fact, as to give the reader the impression that Puddifoot is simply picking up conversations already underway. Instead, she has done a tremendous service in bringing representatives from wide-ranging, often-siloed disciplines into dialogue. Another virtue of Puddifoot’s book is how thoroughly it maps out the actual and possible views and logical spaces revolving around each topic she addresses. How Stereotypes Deceive Us could therefore be used to introduce budding epistemologists to the field, as it offers clear and careful explanations of leading approaches to a range of topics, including virtue epistemology, theory of mind, and more.

This paper is a comment on Quilty-Dunn, Jake, Nicolas Porot, and Eric Mandelbaum. (2023). The best game in town: The reemergence of the language-of-thought hypothesis across the cognitive sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46, e261. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X22002849

The target article signal boosts important ongoing work across the cognitive sciences. However, its theoretical claims, generative value, and purported contributions are – where not simply restatements of arguments extensively explored elsewhere – imprecise, noncommittal, and underdeveloped to a degree that makes them difficult to evaluate. The article’s apparent force results from engaging with straw rather than steel opponents.

While those who take a “structuralist” approach to racial justice issues are right to call attention to the importance of social practices, laws, etc., they sometimes go too far by suggesting that antiracist efforts ought to focus on changing unjust social systems rather than changing individuals’ minds. We argue that while the “either/or” thinking implied by this framing is intuitive and pervasive, it is misleading and self-undermining. We instead advocate for a “both/and” approach to antiracist moral education that explicitly teaches how social structures influence ideas about race and how ideas about race shape, sustain, and transform social structures. Ideally, antiracist moral education will help people see how social change and moral progress depend on the symbiotic relations between individuals and structures. We articulate a conception of “structure-facing virtue” that exemplifies this hybrid approach to illuminate the pivotal role moral education plays in the fight for racial justice.

Endre Begby’s Prejudice: A Study in Non-Ideal Epistemology engages a wide range of issues of enduring interest to epistemologists, applied ethicists, and anyone concerned with how knowledge and justice intersect. Topics include stereotypes and generics, evidence and epistemic justification, epistemic injustice, ethical-epistemic dilemmas, moral encroachment, and the relations between blame and accountability. Begby applies his views about these topics to an equally wide range of pressing social questions, such as conspiracy theories, misinformation, algorithmic bias, discrimination, and criminal justice. Through it all, the book’s central thesis is that prejudices can be epistemically rational, a corrective against what Begby takes to be the received view that prejudices are always and everywhere bad. However, Begby’s arguments do not engage consistently with relevant empirical literatures, misrepresent the positions of his interlocutors, and rehearse ideas already well-established across a range of intellectual traditions.

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic initiated major disruptions to higher education systems. Physical spaces that previously supported interpersonal interaction and community were abruptly inactivated, and faculty largely took on the responsibility of accommodating classroom structures in rapidly changing situations. This study employed interviews to examine how undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) instructors adapted instruction to accommodate the mandated transition to virtual learning and how these accommodations supported or hindered community and belonging during the onset of the pandemic. Interviews with 25 STEM faculty at an undergraduate Hispanic Serving Institution revealed a wide range of accommodations they made to their courses and how they managed communication with students. Faculty strived to support student belonging with responses ranging from caring to crisis management, though some faculty expressed feelings of powerlessness when unable to accommodate certain challenges. The case of a responsive and flexible instructor is presented to highlight a productive response to a crisis. These retrospective findings point to strategies to support faculty teaching in virtual learning environments in the future; increasing opportunities for student–student and student–faculty interaction, supporting faculty in learning technologies that support these interactions and addressing faculty’s feelings of powerlessness.

Commentary on Cesario, Joseph. 2021. “What Can Experimental Studies of Bias Tell Us about Real-World Group Disparities?” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45 (e66): 1–71. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X21000017.

We endorse Cesario’s call for more research into the complexities of “real-world” decisions and the comparative power of different causes of group disparities. Unfortunately, these reasonable suggestions are overshadowed by a barrage of non sequiturs, misdirected criticisms of methodology, and unsubstantiated claims about the assumptions and inferences of social psychologists.

Based on a review of several “anomalies” in research using implicit measures, Machery (2021) dismisses the modal interpretation of participant responses on implicit measures and, by extension, the value of implicit measures. We argue that the reviewed findings are anomalies only for specific—influential but long-contested—accounts that treat responses on implicit measures as uncontaminated indicators of trait-like unconscious representations that coexist with functionally independent conscious representations. However, the reviewed findings are to-be-expected “normalities” when viewed from the perspective of long-standing alternative frameworks that treat responses on implicit measures as the product of dynamic processes that operate on momentarily activated, consciously accessible information. Thus, although we agree with Machery that the modal view is empirically unsupported, we argue that implicit measures can make a valuable contribution to understanding the complexities of human behavior if they are used wisely in a way that acknowledges what they can and cannot do.

The COVID-19 outbreak spurred unplanned closures and transitions to online classes. Physical environments that once fostered social interaction and community were rendered inactive. We conducted interviews and administered surveys to examine undergraduate STEM students’ feelings of belonging and engagement while in physical isolation, and identified online teaching modes associated with these feelings. Surveys from a racially diverse group of 43 undergraduate students at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) revealed that interactive synchronous instruction was positively associated with feelings of interest and belonging, particularly for students of color, while noninteractive instruction reduced social belonging, but was related to more cognitive engagement. Small group and one-on-one interviews with 23 of these students suggest that students derived feelings of connectedness from their instructors, peers, and prior experiences and relied on their sense of competency to motivate themselves in the course and feel a sense of belonging. Two embedded cases of students in physics classrooms are compared to highlight the range of student feelings of connectedness and competency during the lockdown. Findings reaffirm that social interaction tends to support belonging and engagement, particularly for under-represented (Black or African American and Hispanic) racial groups in STEM. STEM instructors who aim to support feelings of belonging and engagement in virtual learning environments should consider increasing opportunities for student–student and student–teacher interactions, as well as taking a flexible approach that validates and integrates student voice into instruction. Future research is needed to further explore the themes of relatedness and competency that emerged as aspects of course belonging.

Comment on Beeghly, Erin. 2021. “Stereotyping as Discrimination: Why Thoughts Can Be Discriminatory.” Social Epistemology 35 (6): 547–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/02691728.2021.1930274

Beeghly’s “Stereotyping as Discrimination” is—characteristically—clear, thorough, and persuasive, rich with incisive arguments and thought-provoking case studies. In defending the view that stereotyping often constitutes discrimination, she makes a powerful case that, “Living ethically means cultivating a certain kind of ‘inner’ life and avoiding pernicious habits of thought, no matter how culturally pervasive” (Beeghly 2021b, 13). Support for such claims is traced back not just to Aristotle and the Ten Commandments (Beeghly 2021b, 10), but also to critical social traditions. “As feminists and theorists of race have long noted, the most intimate aspects of our selves, including our ways of thinking, agency, and modes of embodiment, are among the mechanisms of group oppression” (Beeghly 2021b, 13). I offer, first, a tiny friendly amendment to one brief passage, followed by invitations to explore some of the further potential implications of Beeghly’s central theses.

Scholars, journalists, and activists working on climate change often distinguish between “individual” and “structural” approaches to decarbonization. The former concern choices individuals can make to reduce their “personal carbon footprint” (e.g. eating less meat). The latter concern changes to institutions, laws, and other social structures. These two approaches are often framed as oppositional, representing a mutually exclusive forced choice between alternative routes to decarbonization. After presenting representative samples of this oppositional framing of individual and structural approaches in environmental communication, we identify four problems with oppositional thinking and propose five ways to conceive of individual and structural reform as symbiotic and interdependent.

You can read a blog post about article here: “Individualism, Structuralism, and Climate Change.” Climate Matters: The Blog of the American Philosophical Association (blog). November 18, 2021. https://blog.apaonline.org/2021/11/18/individualism-structuralism-and-climate-change/.

In Chapter 9, “Can Capital Punishment Survive if Black Lives Matter?”, we defend the Movement’s claim that the death penalty is a “racist practice” that “devalues black lives,” and ought to be abolished. We begin by surveying the jurisprudential history of race and capital punishment in the U.S., noting that courts have occasionally expressed worries about racial injustice but have usually called for reform rather than abolition. We argue, however, that racial discrimination in capital contexts flows in part from implicit biases related to race, criminality, and violence. The body of research on implicit bias suggests that court-mandated reforms have and will continue to fail to remediate racial discrimination in capital punishment. We further argue that traditional debates about capital punishment have been overly individualistic, narrowly focused on the justice of the practice for particular defendants and victims. By contrast, drawing from the M4BL’s group-centered approach, we investigate the justice of the practice for the community as a whole, and claim that the case for abolition rests on understanding Black Americans as a class subject to bias and thereby not accorded equal status under the law.

What is the intersectional thesis a thesis about? Some understand it as a claim about the metaphysics of oppression, social kinds, or experience; about the limits of antidiscrimination law or identity politics; or about the importance of fuzzy sets and multifactor analysis in social science. We argue, however, that intersectionality, interpreted as a thesis in any particular theoretical domain, faces regress problems. We propose that headway on these and other questions can be made when intersectionality is modeled as a regulative ideal, i.e., a guiding methodological and practical principle, and not as a general theory or hypothesis. Qua ideal, intersectionality requires activists and inquirers to treat existing classification schemes as if they are indefinitely mutually informing, with the specific aim of revealing and resisting inequality and injustice. Qua regulative, intersectionality points to a rich and expanding set of heuristics for guiding social-scientific research and the construction of multifaceted political coalitions.

I defend an empirically-oriented approach to the analysis and remediation of social injustice. My springboard for this argument is a debate—principally represented here between Tommie Shelby and Elizabeth Anderson, but with much deeper historical roots and many flowering branches—about whether racial-justice advocacy should prioritize integration (bringing different groups together) or community development (building wealth and political power within the black community). Although I incline toward something closer to Shelby’s “egalitarian pluralist” approach over Anderson’s single-minded emphasis on integration, many of Shelby’s criticisms of integrationism are misguided, and his handling of the empirical literature is profoundly unbalanced. In fact, while both Shelby and Anderson defend the importance of social science to their projects, I’ll argue that each takes a decidedly unempirical approach, which ultimately obscures the full extent of our ignorance about what we can and ought to do going forward. A more authentically empirical tack would be more epistemically humble, more holistic, and less organized around what I’ll call prematurely formulated “Grand Unified Theories of Social Change.” I defend a more “diversified experimentalist” approach, which rigorously tests an array of smaller-scale interventions before trying to replicate and scale up the most promising results.

• I wrote a companion blog piece, “Structural change, individual change, and four-story walkups” over at Justice Everywhere.

The summer of 2020 witnessed perhaps the largest protests in American history in response to police and vigilante brutality against the black community. New protests are still erupting every time another suppressed video, such as of Daniel Prude, surfaces, or another killing, such as Breonna Taylor’s, goes unpunished. As communities demand meaningful reform, the point – or pointlessness – of “implicit bias training” takes on renewed urgency. Implicit bias trainings aim to raise awareness about the unwitting or unwilling prejudices and stereotypes that shape our habits of thinking, feeling, and navigating through the social world. These trainings have been widely adopted by businesses, schools, and law enforcement agencies. Do they make any difference?

Although I conduct implicit bias trainings myself (including for courts, judges, police, and attorneys), I share many critics’ concerns. Many trainings are too brief and oversimple, and too often their real function is to permit organisations to “check a box” to protect against litigation, rather than to spark real change. But “implicit bias training” is just another way of saying “education about implicit bias,” and, like all kinds of education, it can be done well or poorly. If implicit bias is one important piece of a large and complex puzzle, then education about it – when done right – should have a meaningful role to play in helping us understand ongoing inequities and enact reforms.

Key Takeaways

• Many trainings are too brief and oversimple
• Once the box is checked… everyone can go back to business as usual
• Bias education needs to become resistance training

Written by a diverse range of scholars, this accessible introductory volume asks: What is implicit bias? How does implicit bias compromise our knowledge of others and social reality? How does implicit bias affect us, as individuals and participants in larger social and political institutions, and what can we do to combat biases? An interdisciplinary enterprise, the volume brings together the philosophical perspective of the humanities with the perspective of the social sciences to develop rich lines of inquiry. Its twelve chapters are written in a non-technical style, using relatable examples that help readers understand what implicit bias is, its significance, and the controversies surrounding it. Each chapter includes discussion questions and additional annotated reading suggestions, and a companion webpage contains teaching resources. The volume is an invaluable resource for students—and researchers—seeking to understand criticisms surrounding implicit bias, as well as how one might answer them by adopting a more nuanced understanding of bias and its role in maintaining social injustice.

You can read a preprint of our introductory chapter to the volume, “Introducing Implicit Bias,” here.

What can we do—and what should we do—to fight against bias? This final chapter introduces empirically-tested interventions for combating implicit (and explicit) bias and promoting a fairer world, from small daily-life debiasing tricks to larger structural interventions. Along the way, this chapter raises a range of moral, political, scientific, and strategic questions and challenges about these strategies. This chapter further stresses the importance of admitting that we don’t have all the answers. We should be humble about how much we still don’t know and dedicate efforts to gathering as much knowledge as possible. Even so, we know enough now to start making a difference, and this chapter ultimately aims to chip away at the gap between our abstract commitments to treat people fairly and our lived habits and experiences, which continue to be shaped by implicit and explicit prejudices and stereotypes about race, gender, and other social categories.

I blogged about our volume over at Imperfect Cognitions. Several of our contributors blogged about their chapters over at the Brains Blog and PEA Soup…

• Gabbrielle Johnson, “The Psychology of Bias: From Data to Theory“
• Céline Leboeuf, “The Embodied Biased Mind“
• Susanna Siegel, “The Limitations of Implicit Bias“
• Kathy Puddifoot and Jules Holroyd, “Epistemic Injustice and Implicit Bias“
• Rima Basu, “Does Fairness Require Inaccuracy?“
• Nancy McHugh and Lacey Davidson, “Epistemic Responsibility and Implicit Bias“

What is the status of research on implicit bias? In light of meta-analyses revealing ostensibly low average correlations between implicit measures and behavior, as well as various other psychometric concerns, criticism has become ubiquitous. We argue that while there are significant challenges and ample room for improvement, research on the causes, psychological properties, and behavioral effects of implicit bias continues to deserve a role in the sciences of the mind as well as in efforts to understand, and ultimately combat, discrimination and inequality.

Social psychologists often describe “implicit” racial biases as entirely unconscious, and as mere associations between groups and traits, which lack intentional content, e.g., we associate “black” and “athletic” in much the same way we associate “salt” and “pepper.” However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, albeit in partial, inarticulate, or even distorted ways. Moreover, evidence suggests that implicit biases are not “dumb” semantic associations, but instead reflect our skillful, norm-sensitive, and embodied engagement with social reality. This essay draws on phenomenological and hermeneutic methods and concepts to better understand what social-psychological research has begun to reveal about the conscious access individuals have to their own racial attitudes, as well as the intentional contents of the attitudes themselves.

First, I argue that implicit racial biases form part of the “background” of social experience. That is, while they exert a pervasive influence on our perceptions, judgments, and actions, they are frequently felt but not noticed, or noticed but misinterpreted. Second, I argue that our unreflective racial attitudes are neither mere associations nor fully articulated, propositionally structured beliefs or emotions. Their intentional contents are fundamentally indeterminate. For example, when a white person experiences a “gut feeling” of discomfort during an interaction with a black person, there is a question about the meaning or nature of that discomfort. Is it a fear of black people? Is it anxiety about appearing racist? There is, I argue, no general, determinate answer to such questions. The contents of our unreflective racial attitudes are fundamentally vague and open-ended, although I explain how they nevertheless take on particular shapes and implications—that is, their content can become determinate—depending on context, social meaning, and structural power relations. (If, for example, a perceived authority figure, such as a politician, parent, or scientist, encourages you to believe that your uncomfortable gut feeling is a justified fear of other social groups, then that is what your gut feeling is likely to become.)

I defend Fricker’s virtue-theoretic proposals for grappling with epistemic injustice, arguing that her account is both empirically oriented and plausible. I agree with Fricker that an integral component of what we ought to do in the face of pervasive epistemic injustice is working to cultivate epistemic habits that aim to consistently neutralize the effects of such prejudices on their credibility estimates. But Fricker does not claim that her specific proposals constitute the only means through which individuals and institutions should combat epistemic injustice. I therefore build on Fricker’s account by beginning to sketch a fuller picture of the structure of cultivating epistemic virtue.

Virtue cultivation must, I argue, occur on two broad but interrelated fronts: first, the direct retraining of more automatic and unreflective patterns of thinking, feeling, and reacting to epistemic social reality, and second, the cultivation of more reflective, metacognitive virtues, such as the ability to swiftly identify contexts in which our first-order epistemic intuitions are likely astray. Although I articulate a range of individual-level obligations, my account is not individualistic. With Fricker, I argue that individual self-transformation is a necessary but not sufficient component of the struggle for epistemic justice. Accordingly, I sketch several ways in which individual virtue cultivation must be a socially and institutionally embedded process. Moreover, I argue that this process is ongoing. While most individuals cannot actually achieve such moral-epistemic ideals, many can (and therefore should try to) get much closer than they already are.

Intuitively, moral responsibility requires conscious awareness of what one is doing, and why one is doing it, but what kind of awareness is at issue? Neil Levy argues that phenomenal consciousness—the qualitative feel of conscious sensations—is entirely unnecessary for moral responsibility. He claims that only access consciousness—the state in which information (e.g., from perception or memory) is available to an array of mental systems (e.g., such that an agent can deliberate and act upon that information)—is relevant to moral responsibility. I argue that numerous ethical, epistemic, and neuroscientific considerations entail that the capacity for phenomenal consciousness is necessary for moral responsibility. I focus in particular on considerations inspired by P. F. Strawson, who puts a range of qualitative moral emotions—the reactive attitudes—front and center in the analysis of moral responsibility.

We identify several ongoing debates related to implicit measures, surveying prominent views and considerations in each debate. First, we summarize the debate regarding whether performance on implicit measures is explained by conscious or unconscious representations. Second, we discuss the cognitive structure of the operative constructs: are they associatively or propositionally structured? Third, we review debates whether performance on implicit measures reflects traits or states. Fourth, we discuss the question of whether a person’s performance on an implicit measure reflects characteristics of the person who is taking the test or characteristics of the situation in which the person is taking the test. Finally, we survey the debate about the relationship between implicit measures and (other kinds of) behavior.

Mark Fedyk argues persuasively for both the importance and the perils of interdisciplinarity in studies of ethical life. The book is dense with incisive argumentation and innovative proposals for integrating moral, social, and political philosophy with the psychological and social sciences. It will be of interest to aprioristically inclined normative and social theorists peeking over the fence at the empirical side of things, to experimentalists trying to operationalize or intervene upon real-world ethical thought and action—and to everyone in between…

Background. Drawing on social identity theory and positive psychology, this study investigated women’s responses to the social environment of physics classrooms. It also investigated STEM identity and gender disparities on academic achievement and flourishing in an undergraduate introductory physics course for STEM majors. 160 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory physics course were administered a baseline survey with self-report measures on course belonging, physics identification, flourishing, and demographics at the beginning of the course and a post-survey at the end of the academic term. Students also completed force concept inventories and physics course grades were obtained from the registrar. Results. Women reported less course belonging and less physics identification than men. Physics identification and grades evidenced a longitudinal bidirectional relationship for all students (regardless of gender) such that when controlling for baseline physics knowledge: (a) students with higher physics identification were more likely to earn higher grades; and (b) students with higher grades evidenced more physics identification at the end of the term. Men scored higher on the force concept inventory than women, although no gender disparities emerged for course grades. For women, higher physics (versus lower) identification was associated with more positive changes in flourishing over the course of the term. High-identifying men showed the opposite pattern: negative change in flourishing was more strongly associated with high identifiers than low identifiers. Conclusions. Overall, this study underlines gender disparities in physics both in terms of belonging and physics knowledge. It suggests that strong STEM identity may be associated with academic performance and flourishing in undergraduate physics courses at the end of the term, particularly for women. A number of avenues for future research are discussed. (Note: we also collected data on students in introduction to philosophy and introduction to economics; data analysis is underway.)

Are individuals morally responsible for their implicit biases?  One reason to think not is that implicit biases are often advertised as unconscious, “introspectively inaccessible” attitudes.  However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, although often in partial and inarticulate ways.  Here I explore the implications of this evidence of partial awareness for individuals’ moral responsibility.  First, I argue that a graded notion of responsibility (i.e., that responsibility comes in degrees) is independently plausible.  Second, I argue that individuals’ partial awareness of their implicit biases suffices to make them (partially) morally responsible for them.  I make an argument by analogy to a close relative of implicit bias: moods.  The degree of awareness that individuals have of their moods makes them responsible for mood-influenced action, and the awareness individuals have of their implicitly biased behavior is importantly similar. (Abbreviated Version for a Talk, Handout)

A shortened and student-oriented version of this paper became “Implicit Bias,” in Hugh LaFollette (Ed.), Ethics in practice: an anthology (Fifth edition, 413–421). Wiley.

The abolition of capital punishment is among the reforms the Black Lives Matter movement has called for in response to what it calls “the war against Black people” and “Black communities” in the United States. Drawing on the large body of studies indicating discrimination against Blacks both as capital defendants and as murder victims, the movement asserts that the death penalty in the U.S. is a “racist practice” that “devalues Black lives.” This article defends the two central contentions embedded in the movement’s abolitionist stance: first, that U.S. capital punishment practices represent a wrong to Black communities rather than simply a wrong to particular Black capital defendants or particular Black victims of murder, and second, that the most defensible remedy for this wrong is the abolition of the death penalty. We argue that while Black Americans suffer retributive injustices in the U.S. capital punishment regime, Black Americans as a class also suffer a distributive injustice under that regime inasmuch as Black Americans do not receive either the equal protection of, or equal status under, the law. Moreover, these patterns of discrimination cannot be explained without reference to implicit racial biases likely to influence capital punishment decisions reached by prosecutors, judges, and juries. The failure to remedy such discrimination thus represents a form of institutional recklessness with respect to Black lives and legal status. Among plausible remedies, only abolition, either de facto or de jure, succeeds in both eliminating the discriminatory effects of this bias-based recklessness and in not being itself unjust.

How do cognition and affect interact to produce action?  Research in intergroup psychology illuminates this question by investigating the relationship between stereotypes and prejudices about social groups.  Yet it is now clear that many social attitudes are implicit (roughly, nonconscious or involuntary).  This raises the question: how does the distinction between cognition and affect apply to implicit mental states?  An influential view—roughly analogous to a Humean theory of action—is that “implicit stereotypes” and “implicit prejudices” constitute two separate constructs, reflecting different mental processes and neural systems.  On this basis, some have also argued that interventions to reduce discrimination should combat implicit stereotypes and prejudices separately.  We propose an alternative (anti-Humean) framework.  We argue that all putative implicit stereotypes are affect-laden and all putative implicit prejudices are “semantic,” that is, they stand in co-activating associations with concepts and beliefs.  Implicit biases, therefore, consist in “clusters” of semantic-affective associations, which differ in degree, rather than kind.  This framework captures the psychological structure of implicit bias, promises to improve the power of indirect measures to predict behavior, and points toward the design of more effective interventions to combat discrimination.

Most accounts of implicit bias focus on “mere associations” between concepts of groups and traits (e.g., woman and nurturing).  Some have argued that implicit biases must have a richer conceptual structure, although, to this point, they have said little about what this richer structure might be.  To address this lacuna, we build on research in philosophy and cognitive science demonstrating that concepts encode dependency relations between features.  Dependency relations determine the centrality of a feature f, relative to a concept C: i.e., the degree to which other features of C depend on f.  Crucially, centrality and associative strength come apart.  For example, the feature having bones is more central to the concept lion than is having a mane (lions who are female, young, or shaved have bones but not manes); however, while much of our thinking about lions depends on their having bones, this central feature might not show up in measures of associative strength (participants might be faster to associate “lion” with “mane” than with “bones”).  We argue that some implicit gender biases reflect differences in the central features encoded in gender concepts.  We defend this claim in a series of experiments exploring biases regarding gender, intelligence, and effort.  Roughly, we find that participants are equally likely to associate women and men professors with intelligence, but that participants think the intelligence of women professors centrally depends on their being hard-working, whereas men’s intelligence does not so depend.  We conclude by considering the social and political implications of this conceptually complex gender bias and point toward future research to uncover the distinctive features taken to be central to specific social groups of gender, race, disability, and so on.

Research suggests that interventions involving extensive training or counterconditioning can reduce implicit prejudice and stereotyping, and even susceptibility to stereotype threat.  This research is widely cited as providing an “existence proof” that certain entrenched social attitudes are capable of change, but is summarily dismissed—by philosophers, psychologists, and activists alike—as lacking direct, practical import for the broader struggle against prejudice, discrimination, and inequality.  Criticisms of these “debiasing” procedures fall into three categories: concerns about empirical efficacy, about practical feasibility, and about the failure to appreciate the underlying structural-institutional nature of discrimination.  I reply to these criticisms of debiasing, and argue that a comprehensive strategy for combating prejudice and discrimination should include a central role for training our biases away. 

This essay, which is a companion paper to “Biased against Debiasing,” responds in greater depth to the criticism that contemporary efforts to redress discrimination and inequality are overly individualistic.  Critics of individualism emphasize that these systemic social ills stem not from the prejudice, irrationality, or selfishness of individuals, but from underlying structural-institutional forces.  They are skeptical, therefore, of attempts to change individuals’ attitudes while leaving structural problems intact.  I argue that the insistence on prioritizing structural over individual change is problematic and misleading.  My view is not that we should instead prioritize individual change, but that individual changes are integral to the success of structural changes.  These theorists urge a redirection of attention, claiming that we should think less about the individual and more about the social.  What they should urge instead is that we think differently about the individual, and thereby think differently about the social.

Can research on implicit bias shed light on issues related to teaching Latina/os in philosophy? Yes, with caveats. In particular, no one will be surprised to learn that implicit bias against (and among) Latina/os and Latin Americans is severely understudied. While Latina/os make up the largest minority group in the United States, recent estimates suggest that there is more than six times as much research on stereotyping and prejudice against African-Americans as there is against Latina/os. I speculate about some causes and remedies for this disparity, but my primary aims in this essay are different. First, I attempt to stitch together the general literature regarding anti-Latina/o bias with the general literature regarding bias in education in order to convey some of the basic challenges that bias likely poses to Latina/o students. Second, I consider whether Latin American philosophy might itself serve a bias-reducing function. Specifically, I sketch—in tentative and promissory terms—how the traditional “problem” of group identity explored in Latina/o and Latin American thought might function as part of the “solution” to the stereotypes and prejudices that have helped to sustain an exclusionary atmosphere in Anglo-American philosophy. Given the dearth of literature on the situation of Latina/os in philosophy, my claims here build on findings about the situations of minorities in education more broadly.

Should we understand implicit attitudes on the model of belief?  I argue that implicit attitudes are (probably) members of a different psychological kind altogether, because they seem to be insensitive to the logical form of an agent’s thoughts and perceptions.  A state is sensitive to logical form only if it is sensitive to the logical constituents of the content of other states (e.g., operators like negation and conditional).  I explain sensitivity to logical form and argue that it is a necessary condition for belief.  I appeal to two areas of research that seem to show that implicit attitudes fail spectacularly to satisfy this condition—although persistent gaps in the empirical literature leave matters inconclusive.  I sketch an alternative account, according to which implicit attitudes are sensitive merely to spatiotemporal relations in thought and perception, i.e., the spatial and temporal orders in which people think, see, or hear things.​ (PPT)

This paper is centered around an apparent tension that research on implicit bias raises between virtue and social knowledge.  Research suggests that simply knowing what the prevalent stereotypes are leads individuals to act in prejudiced ways—biasing decisions about whom to trust and whom to ignore, whom to promote and whom to imprison—even if they reflectively reject those stereotypes.  Because efforts to combat discrimination obviously depend on knowledge of stereotypes, a question arises about what to do next.  I argue that the obstacle to virtue is not knowledge of stereotypes as such, but the “accessibility” of such knowledge to the agent who has it.  “Accessibility” refers to how easily knowledge comes to mind.  Social agents can acquire the requisite knowledge of stereotypes while resisting their pernicious influence, so long as that knowledge remains, in relevant contexts, relatively inaccessible.
(I elaborate on these issues in a post on the Brains Blog here.)

While the causal contributions of so-called ‘automatic’ processes to behavior are now widely acknowledged, less attention has been given to their normative role in the guidance of action. We develop an account of the normativity of automaticity that responds to and builds upon Tamar Szabó Gendler’s account of ‘alief’, an associative and arational mental state more primitive than belief. Alief represents a promising tool for integrating psychological research on automaticity with philosophical work on mind and action, but Gendler errs in overstating the degree to which aliefs are norm-insensitive.

Social psychologists tell us that much of human behavior is automatic. It is natural to think that automatic behavioral dispositions are ethically desirable if and only if they are suitably governed by an agent’s reflective judgments. However, we identify a class of automatic dispositions that make normatively self-standing contributions to praiseworthy action and a well-lived life, independently of, or even in spite of, an agent’s reflective judgments about what to do. We argue that the fundamental questions for the “ethics of automaticity” are what automatic dispositions are (and are not) good for and when they can (and cannot) be trusted.

Committee: Christia Mercer (adviser), Patricia Kitcher, Taylor Carman, Tamar Szabó Gendler, Virginia Valian

My dissertation is about prejudice.  It examines the theoretical and ethical questions raised by research on implicit social biases.  My approach is grounded in a comprehensive examination of empirical research and, as such, is a contribution to both philosophy and social psychology.  Social biases are termed “implicit” when they are not reported, though they lie just beneath the surface of consciousness.  Such biases are easy to adopt but very difficult to introspect and control.  Despite this difficulty, I argue that we are obligated to overcome, even remove, our biases if they can bring harm to ourselves or to others.  Understanding the particular character of implicit biases is vital to determining how to replace them with more preferable habits of mind.  I argue for a model of interpersonal fluency, a kind of ethical expertise that requires transforming our underlying dispositions of thought, feeling, and action.

Chapters 1 and 2 address the underlying nature of implicit biases.  Researchers in philosophy and psychology agree that implicit attitudes involve a psychological connection between social categories (e.g., age, race, or gender) and traits (e.g., being forgetful, athletic, or nurturing).  Researchers disagree about how best to model the structure of this connection.  Some argue that, due to their influence on judgment and action, implicit biases should be understood as unconscious beliefs.  I argue, however, that implicit biases fail to meet the minimal necessary conditions for belief.  In some respects, implicit biases resemble the primitive associations we make, say, between “salt” and “pepper” or “apples” and “oranges,” when our minds move from one state to the next simply out of habit.  For example, hearing the phrase, “Old people are not bad drivers,” can enhance rather than reduce bias against the elderly, simply by strengthening a mental association between “old people” and “bad drivers.”  I conclude that implicit biases are not reducible to more familiar psychological states such as belief or desire.  Rather, they constitute a class of their own.

Chapter 3 turns to the practical implications of discovering a psychological state that drives so much behavior, but differs so much from belief and desire.  Given the ease of adopting and the difficulty of controlling implicit biases, are we as individuals morally responsible for them?  I argue that we are.  Although implicit biases can easily escape conscious attention, individuals are sufficiently aware of them to be responsible for their harmful expression and therefore obliged to change them.  Appreciating how each of us contributes to the harms of implicit bias will be vital for bringing about meaningful change.

The fundamental concern surrounding implicit bias is not, I take it, the backward-looking question of how we got into this mess, but the forward-looking question of how to get out of it.  Chapters 4 and 5 address the question how to move away from social biases and toward more preferable habits of mind.  The prevailing approach among social psychologists and activists has been to identify strategies for suppressing the overt expression of biases and impulses whose content we reflectively disavow.  I argue, by contrast, that the ethical imperative is for us to revise our standing social dispositions, not simply to control or circumvent them.  Treating others and ourselves fairly requires that we transform our underlying attitudes by reconfiguring our automatic dispositions of thought, feeling, and action.  We must take the basic first steps toward cultivating interpersonal fluency, the virtuous opposite of implicit bias, an ideal state of social know-how in which an individual’s dispositions are automatically egalitarian and unprejudiced.