This post about psychological explanation and implicit bias by Gabbrielle Johnson is the first post of this week’s series on An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind (Routledge, 2020). Find the other posts here.
Here’s a peculiar thing about people: often what they do doesn’t match what they say they believe. Your roommate might express utter disdain for Chipotle, yet go there for lunch nearly every day. When this happens, it’s hard to attribute to her any beliefs that explain her lunchtime behavior. These sorts of divergences are common—but how do we make sense of them, and reconcile them with our normal, belief-centric psychological explanations?
A Dilemma
This is, broadly, the puzzle that implicit bias presents to the philosophy of mind. Especially in light of recent events, many white Americans are being forced to confront the question of whether their own daily habits and impulses are out of sync with their anti-racist commitments. Direct measures of racism (having people report their beliefs) suggest a decline in many racial biases. Despite this, the pervasive and destructive effects of racism are still painfully evident: people still harbor racist opinions that influence their beliefs about, and actions towards, people of color. One explanation is that people are less comfortable admitting to those opinions. (Though current events make clear that, given the right context, people will readily admit to and endorse racist attitudes.) Another, non-competing explanation is that in at least some cases, those opinions are not apparent even to those harboring them. Researchers have therefore developed indirect methods like the now-famous Implicit Association Test (IAT), which paint a much more complicated picture of social attitudes.
In my chapter for An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind, I tell the story of the puzzle that implicit bias presents. I center it around two conflicting fact-patterns in the implicit bias data, which I call divergence and rationality. I highlight the difficulties these present to psychological explanation more generally and evaluate to what extent prominent explanations of implicit bias avoid these difficulties.
Divergence
I first explore divergence: our results on direct and indirect tests diverge. Focus on divergence produces what I call dual-construct models of implicit bias. Consider the standard associationist picture of implicit biases: an implicit bias against the elderly means that the biased person quickly, automatically, and unconsciously associates someone’s being elderly with their being frail, forgetful, or bad with computers. This view comes naturally, as we’re used to our minds making quick, automatic, unconscious associations: when I say salt, you say pepper. You don’t need to deliberate about what comes next; you just know. These models are a natural explanation for divergence: because they posit two distinct, independent mental constructs that operate at different levels; they predict different results depending on which level an individual is relying upon.
Rationality
Next, I explore rationality: results on indirect measures are sometimes responsive to rational interventions. This implies that implicit biases can be rational, which is surprising for the dual-construct model. It implies that, perhaps, implicit attitudes are relevantly similar to explicit beliefs. Focus on rationality produces the second major camp of theory, belief-based models, which posit a single mental state type (typically beliefs) responsible for results on both measures.
So sometimes implicit biases act like beliefs, and sometimes they do not. Assimilating implicit biases to beliefs leaves some data unexplained; likewise for positing a distinction from beliefs. That is, although both theories excel at answering their fact-patterns of choice, each falter in resolving the other’s. Explaining the other’s data requires revising familiar characterizations of ordinary psychological kinds. This undermines the theoretical upshots of the assimilation in the first place; worse, it risks becoming ad-hoc.
Resolving The Dilemma
One solution to this dilemma is to posit a new, sui generis mental category, like patchy endorsements or in-between beliefs or aliefs. Fitting the data is an obvious appeal; but this risks overfitting. Consider the ‘homunculus fallacy’. This is an attempt to explain some intelligent behavior by positing some equally intelligent cause, like a little person (homunculus) inside the head of the first intelligent creature (think Pixar’s Inside Out). The purpose of introducing the homunculus is to explain the being’s behavior. But without explaining the homunculus’s behavior, we haven’t explained anything. Like positing a homunculus, positing a sui generis state that can do all and only the explaining we need to do is too convenient; closer inspection shows it’s not providing any explanation at all.
So it seems there is no simple, monolithic psychological explanation to give. Is there even a unified phenomenon? Some philosophers raise the possibility that there is not. But we need not give up on implicit bias as a legitimate area of psychological explanation. There is still much more work to be done; but the possibility is open that the views above might find a home together—with different, important roles—some day.
We must search for different explanations; describe where they’re apt; investigate what if anything unifies them; and do this all while ensuring that our explanations are genuinely explanatory.
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Post Script: My own work since writing this chapter attempts this by arguing for a functional characterization of social bias, which leaves open which mental states and processes bridge the input-output gap. As evidenced by the aforementioned views, I believe there are many possible candidates. But in capturing the functional properties of psychological social bias, I argue its place is secured within the broader, unified kind of psychological bias more generally.
Learn more about the book, including its chapters with implications about criminal justice and policing from the recent series of blog posts over at Imperfect Cognitions.