Another important aspect of Wilson's discussion is the phenomenon, I'm sure you've heard of it, of implicit bias, where implicit bias is defined as a set of unconscious mental prejudices that we harbor without necessarily being at fault or being blameworthy for doing so at least until we're made aware of them. That can make us biased towards others. So, just for example having grown up watching commercials and movies made in Hollywood, not necessarily engaging in overtly racist or sexist behavior; just being exposed to the larger culture for example, you can according to this theory of implicit bias, have implicit bias. That is biases that you can't be aware of by introspection and that can nevertheless have a big impact on your behavior. So to take one example, researchers tried to figure out whether realtors; people whose job it is to sell real estate have biases of which they are unaware. The researchers did an experiment in which you had African-American, White, as well as Hispanic couples going to look for a house and they contacted a realtor for help with that. Everything about those different couples is the same in the sense of income, and credit history, and ability to pay and so forth. The only relevant difference is the different racial characteristics, and the realtors characteristically, typically and with very robust results, tended to steer the white applicants towards higher-end generally more white communities, and the realtors would steer the African-American and Hispanic applicants towards less high-end, slightly more ghettoized and more racially diverse communities instead. In spite of the fact that nobody expressed a preference for being one kind of community or another for the home that they were choosing. Furthermore, when the realtors were asked whether or not they had any bias in their treatment of different clients, they vowed, no, of course they didn't and they were very strenuous in their disavowal. So, this seems to be a case in which their behavior, the behavior of the realtors, is best explained by the idea they do have biases of which they are unaware, and obviously they couldn't even be aware of by introspecting. So you notice, these realtors are not being accused of being racist in the traditional sense, it's not as if they believe that skin color matters. They can't introspect and find within themselves any view to the fact that being white as opposed to being black or Hispanic makes a difference for one's worthiness in owning a house of a certain type, or having access to a certain type of career or education but they act as if they do. So, this is a disturbing kind of set of data. The implicit bias discussion is disturbing for many people because it suggests that you can be racist, you can be sexist without being able to introspect on any of those attitudes and as you can see, that would make it that much more challenging to change your attitudes. If you've got introspectable attitudes of a racist or sexist kind, you might leverage when talking them through, reading literature that might convince you otherwise, thereby change your mind. But the theory of implicit bias suggests that, no amount of reading of egalitarian, anti-racist, anti-sexist literature is going to change your mind because that aspect of your mind is not open to introspective intervention. Another example, and this is at two different levels for elementary school teachers. If observed carefully by researchers, show that they, in the course of teaching math, tend to call on boys more than they call on girls. If you ask the elementary school teacher whether he or she is calling more on one sex rather than the other, their answer will be of course not, no. But if you actually count the number of times that a boy is called on as opposed to a girl, you'll find that there's a bias towards calling on boys in math education. That seems disturbing and most teachers who are shown that their pattern of behavior tends to be one in which they call on boys more than girls, are disturbed rightly so by that result. In a very recent study that was discussed in national public radio, then picked up by the New York Times, even preschool teachers seem to show a bias of the following kind. They're given an experiment but in which they're asked to watch films of children behaving in one form or another maybe drawing pictures or playing with a toy, and they're asked to just watch for any signs of inappropriate or a potentially troubling behavior. Researchers trained a camera that tracks the movement of their eyes and that could tell what they were looking at. Characteristically, these preschool teachers tended to watch the African-American kids much more carefully than the white kids for signs of potential trouble because that's what they're asked to watch out for. Furthermore, they tended to watch the boys much more commonly than they did the girls. So, the idea is that they are much more so to speak, �trigger happy� with regard to their experience of African-American boys even at age three or four, even before they get to school. Therefore as you can imagine, more likely to report something even if it's not there or only questionably there. So if you're looking for an explanation as to why it is that African-American boys are more likely to be suspended from school even in their early years of schooling, even before school, a partial explanation is that of bias on the part of the preschool teacher and again, those biases are not ones of which the preschool teacher is aware by introspecting consciously. The only way in which you could get someone to be aware, is by showing them the data about the movement of their eyes. But even then, they can be aware of it without being able to see, so to speak in a first personal way, what it is about them that makes them act that way. You can go onto a website known as projectimplicit.org and actually can carry out a test on your own potential biases that have to do with subliminal priming of various kinds. Seeing what choices you make, you can determine whether or not you've got a certain amount of implicit bias. I'll warn you, the answer is probably yes. You'll probably find that you've got some disturbing biases that you prefer not to have. So, buyer beware, and these are biases that concern skin color, physical disability, body type, et cetera, all kinds of things that people can be biased towards. You might find that you have some biases that you're not entirely happy to find out about and that raised a very difficult question, how if at all is it possible to make any changes once you've become aware of them.
