I. What is Implicit Bias?

Bias is a prejudice in favor of or “against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair.” It is that last part of the definition that has given biases a bad rap. The truth is, without our biases, we would not be able to function.

Many estimates suggest that an adult makes about 35,000 remotely conscious decisions each day, making 226.7 decisions per day on food alone. Human brains process 400 billion bits of information per second, but only about 2000 bits are utilized and make us aware of our surroundings. If we consciously reflected on every piece of data, and every choice we faced, we would quickly become paralyzed, unable to keep up with the remarkable pace of our world. Our biases are one tool that we use to deal with the deluge of information and wealth of decisions.

Biases can be either explicit or implicit. A person is aware of an explicit bias. Implicit biases are biases of which we are not aware; it is this lack of self-knowledge that makes them so dangerous.

You might know that you hate snakes. If you were to see snakes on the sidewalk in front of your house, you might take the long way around, or not come outside at all until they were gone. With a little more knowledge, you might recognize that one snake is a coral snake, and the other is a scarlet snake. The coral snake is venomous and the scarlet snake is not. Knowing about the existence of your bias, and a little knowledge about snakes, would allow you to make a decision that is not influenced by your biases.

The impact of our biases on decision-making is hardwired and not exclusive to humans. Implicit in-group preferences exist even among other species, like the rhesus macaques. However, culture and environment provide the details through which we define those biases. Our early experiences and recent events, cultural biases and explicit beliefs, all combine to form our biases. Then, when a stimulus primes an existing bias, the biases act to inform our decision-making and behavior.

When we talk about discrimination (or the -isms), we focus on the way explicit biases affect our behavior. However, in many institutions, implicit biases are much more likely to lead to discrimination. Implicit biases tend to be the source of discrimination because we tend to discount the extent to which we hold implicit biases and their influence on our conscious behavior. It is much easier to identify explicit biases and the discrimination that follows from them than to understand the impact of biases we did not know we had. Because we are generally unaware of our implicit biases, we cannot work to lessen their influence on our decisions. Exploring our implicit biases, in the context of substantive law and policy, is an important step in eliminating their influence on that law and policy.