It’s Not You, It’s Us

Why Our Implicit Biases Are Due to Culture, Not Just Individual Failings

“In places where implicit bias in a community is higher than average, police shootings of minorities are also higher than average. Eric’s analysis effectively pinpoints where police shootings are likely to happen. But here’s what makes the finding crazy. Most people who take the IAT are not police officers.”

From Hidden Brain Podcast, NPR https://www.npr.org/transcripts/876073130

In September 2016, Terence Crutcher’s SUV was stopped in the middle of the road in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He stepped out of his car, left the doors open and the engine running. A woman saw and called 911. Police officers responded and drew tasers and guns. Terence raised his hands as the police required. Then he lowered them. One officer, Betty Shelby, fired her gun and killed Terence Crutcher. He was a 40 year old African American, churchgoing man and father of four children. She was a 42 year old white mom. He was born and raised in Tulsa, she was born and raised just outside of Tulsa.

Did a white officer shoot a Black man because she was racist? On an episode of the Hidden Brain podcast titled “The Air We Breathe: Implicit Bias and Police Shootings,” host Shakar Vedantam investigates how our individual actions are informed by the societies we live in.

He interviews Mahzarin Banaji, a psychology professor at Harvard who researches implicit bias. Banaji explains that implicit bias is informed by culture: “we are being driven to act in certain ways not because we are explicitly prejudiced but because we may carry in our heads the thumbprint of the culture.”

Banaji and her team developed a way to test implicit bias called the Implicit Association Test (IAT). It measures how our brains group things, like when you say bread, I think butter. Or when I say Black, you say bad.

Psychology Professor at McGill University, Eric Hehman was curious to know if police shootings were higher in areas with higher IAT scores. He overlaid maps of IAT scores and police homicides and found that “[i]n places where implicit bias in a community is higher than average, police shootings of minorities are also higher than average.” Hehman’s analysis allows him to pinpoint where police shootings are likely to happen.

The curious thing is that police don’t typically take the IAT. Hehman explains that even though individual officers’ IAT scores are not in the data set, the scores reflect “the mind of the community as a whole.” Officers who live in communities where more folks associate Black people with danger are more likely to make a split second decision based on that association.

Your brain is dynamic, changeable and flexible. At any age. The science of neuroplasticity says so. This changeability is not always positive or negative, however, it depends on internal and external factors. Implicit biases are ideas we all hold about a race, gender or other social categories that can lead to discrimination “without intent or awareness.” Yes, we can all do work to change those implicit biases with our flexible brains, but it is not just an internal, individual effort that is required.

Research shows that although we each hold these individual biases, external societal factors are the reason those biases continue to remain steady — even in the face of each person’s own dynamic neuroplasticity. In Payne, Vuletich and Lundberg’s 2017 paper published in Psychological Inquiry titled “The Bias of Crowds: How Implicit Bias Bridges Personal and Systemic Prejudice,” researchers argue implicit bias levels remain steady over the general population while individuals levels change because of “concept accessibility.”

Concept accessibility is “the likelihood that a thought, evaluation, stereotype, trait or other piece of info will be retrieved for use.” When society provides us with stereotypes at every corner, billboard, TV show and news article, those stereotypes are easily accessible. When our flexible brains experience something against stereotype, say an interaction with an African American experimenter, our individual level of implicit bias will decrease. But only temporarily.

Even after a few hours, “average levels of implicit bias snap stubbornly back to their baseline levels.” The classic interpretation of this result is that we have ingrained implicit biases within each of us, like well rutted roads, that we always return to. However, Payne et al.’s research shows that population implicit biases levels are linked more to geography and context than to individual beliefs. Your environment determines your daily diet of stereotypical ideas. It’s not you, it’s us and our culture.

Whew. That is a slight relief.

Payne et al. call this phenomena “the bias of crowds.” A population’s implicit bias comes from whatever ideas are most accessible to that population. Payne et al. recognize that research has long shown that “that a person’s context and culture contribute to their implicit biases.” However, they argue that bias does not exist permanently in each individual mind, but rather in the situations they inhabit. Culture isn’t just a factor, it is the source of bias. The empirical data show that biases pass through our minds and are not an attribute of us as individuals.

We are conduits for biases, not just the generators of them.

Culture is “the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time.” Payne et al. argue that there is a “high degree of prejudice in contemporary culture.” This shows up in “biased depictions in the media…segregation in everyday interactions…[and] daily observations of which social groups tend to occupy high-status and low-status positions.” Bias is the cultural air we breathe. This explains why children show the same biases as adults even though individual bias levels fluctuate throughout our lives.

When you understand bias as a cultural, rather than an individual, issue then you can better understand how systemic racism, or systemic bias functions. Each generation moves through similar cultural systems and individuals act as conduits for the biases integrated into those perennial structures.

Our biases are the prejudiced fruits of a well-pruned societal tree.

Payne et al. refer to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina that flooded lower lying regions of New Orleans. Even though the natural disaster was a “random misfortune,” it disproportionately impacted poor, Black residents who lived in those areas. Their residence in lower-lying sections was not a random misfortune. Rather, it was the result of “historical inequalities in property ownership and residential segregation.” Evacuation plans relied on the interstate highways and assumed that residents had cars. This put folks without cars, “primarily poor and Black residents,” at risk.

Cultural biases have concrete consequences, and you can’t point the finger at any one individual for structural inequalities.

Individuals are markers of societal biases. However, when individuals turn those easily accessible, stereotypical thoughts into individual action, that is when discrimination happens. Payne et al. review evidence on geographic variability that suggests “that stereotypical thoughts and feelings will tend to be more accessible in regions with higher levels of structural prejudice.” People who live in areas with higher cultural biases will commit more discriminatory acts, both large and small.

We are products of our environment. Even though our individual bias levels fluctuate based on what interactions and media we experience, the overall bias levels for our towns remain the same. Due to structural bias.

Recent situations at Google, one of the top three tech giants, speak to how a company’s culture translates into discriminatory actions. One of Google’s top artificial intelligence researchers, Dr. Timnit Gebru, was fired “in part over internal emails she sent about the firm’s diversity efforts.” A few weeks later, April Christina Curley, a former diversity recruiter for Google, says she was fired from the company for “speaking up about racial justice.” Google contests both accounts and says both employees resigned.

Situations like these are indicators of an organization’s culturally held, structural biases. Individuals within Google are responsible for the discriminatory actions they took against Gebru and Curley, however Payne et al.’s research reminds us that those actions are markers for overarching structural bias. Google’s internal culture reflects the culture that created Google.

When you think about your company’s culture, what kinds of easily accessible thoughts or concepts permeate the air?

Does the culture foster diversity and inclusivity or does it provide your dynamic brain with fuel for the implicit bias fire?

Let us know in the comments!

Small World Solutions strives to help organizations create a diverse, vibrant and dynamic environment. We achieve this via our consulting philosophy, which is based on applied behavioral science, grounded in sound data and driven by human behavior psychology. Our New IQ framework will help your company cultivate the essential building blocks for an inclusive environment.