San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt (pictured) talks about her new book, “Biased.”
Stanford author taps neuroscience to explain why prejudice persists
Jennifer Eberhardt knows how hard it is to talk about, let alone confront within ourselves, the ways implicit racial bias can affect our perceptions of others, not to mention the snap judgments and stereotyping that can result without us even realizing it.
The Stanford social psychologist, MacArthur genius grant recipient and expert on implicit-bias training for law enforcement (including the Oakland Police Department, which Eberhardt has consulted with since 2014) has spent more than 20 years studying not only the observational effects of cognitive bias but also the neuroscience that helps explain our propensity for categorizing people in the world around us.
As Eberhardt explains in her important new book “Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, And Do,” (Viking; 352 pages; $28) the notion that “our brains are wired for bias” first became clear to her when she was just 12 years old. Her family moved from an all-black neighborhood in Cleveland to Beachwood, an exclusively white suburb. Eberhardt was surprised to find she had difficulty telling her new white classmates apart. Only years later did she discover that her experience was an example of the well-documented scientific phenomenon called the “other-race effect.”
“It’s a precursor for bias,” she says, which neuroimaging has now located in the brain’s visual-recognition “fusiform face area.”
In “Biased,” Eberhardt weaves poignant personal examples into a detailed discussion of the numerous research studies she has conducted on, for example, the cultural association between black men and crime, and the impact of racially biased language in routine traffic stops.
So, how do we rid ourselves of our brain’s penchant for bias?
We don’t, says Eberhardt. Instead, she says, we need to learn how to slow down enough to interrogate our own mind-set before acting on hidden prejudice. “How often are we really the tolerant, fair-minded person we want to be?” she writes. “And how can we learn to check ourselves and mute the negative impact that bias can have?”
Eberhardt spoke about “Biased” at her home on the Stanford campus, where she lives with her husband, Stanford law Professor Ralph Richard Banks, and their three sons.
Q: You make the point that unconscious racial bias is difficult to talk about in part because people assume it’s tantamount to racism. But you write that “you don’t have to be a bigot to be biased.” Is it important to see bias and racism differently?
A: Yes, it is. In terms of definitions, implicit or unconscious bias can be defined as the beliefs and feelings that we have about social groups that can influence our decision-making and our actions, even when we’re not aware of it. It’s very different from and a lot more widespread than old-fashioned racism. Everybody is vulnerable to unconscious bias, even children. It has to do both with how our brains are wired and also the society we live in, which has an impact on how our neurons fire.
One of the reasons it’s so difficult to talk about is because people feel like if you bring up the issue of bias, you’re implying you’re a bad person. It gets tied up in this notion of a moral failing, and people get very defensive. Yet, people act all the time on biases that do real damage without having to have a bigoted heart to do that.
Q: Is that why you included the story of your son, Everett, getting on a plane with you at age 5? He saw a black passenger boarding and said, “I hope that man doesn’t rob the plane.” So, even a young African American boy had already internalized our culture’s pervasive association between blackness and criminality?
A: Exactly. It underscores how all of us are absorbing these associations of a particular group with a particular behavior — even the people most affected by the biases. So, black men, for example, show the same kind of implicit bias as white men because everybody’s affected by the social dynamics and environment they’re living in.
Q: Being stressed or rushed exacerbates bias, and yet these are exactly the circumstances in which police officers make splitsecond, life-and-death decisions. Doesn’t that make your implicit-bias training with law enforcement even more challenging?
A: One thing that helps is showing them that if you even change one practice that encourages you to slow down and check yourself, you see a resulting change. Anti-bias training doesn’t magically erase prejudice, but it makes us aware of how our minds work and what drives kneejerk choices so that we can be mindful of the situations that trigger bias. Something as simple as adding a check mark to traffic-stop reports can change your mind-set. (Oakland police must now note if their stop was “intelligence-led.”) After adding that one question — getting officers to think, “Do I need to make this stop?” — the number of stops plummeted, from 32,000 in 2017 down to 19,000 in 2018. A simple tweak to a form becomes a tweak to your mind-set.
Q: What can you share
about your consulting work with tech companies to address racial profiling?
A: Take the example of Nextdoor. It was built on the model of bringing people together, and they have enormous reach in people’s lives. Yet, they were finding that people were using the platform to racially profile. Again, a relatively simple intervention was shown to have profound effects in deterring bias. You used to use a Crime and Safety tab to post something like, “Saw a suspicious black man in the neighborhood.” Now, you have to first answer a few questions that get you to think specifically, what about this person’s behavior makes them suspicious? It adds some important friction. Instead of “see something, say something,” they modified the imperative to “if you see something suspicious, say something specific.” A simple change, but it affects millions of people all at once and had real impact.
Q: You’ve studied bias for decades. Does it feel more urgent to you now?
A: It does, because it feels like we’re at a moment in the country that’s different from what I’ve witnessed in my lifetime, like we’re embattled and the norms are shifting. That’s one of the reasons I went to Charlottesville, Va. (where a white supremacist “Unite the Right” rally turned violent in 2017). We keep thinking our work is done on this, without quite realizing that the work is never done. Even when we make progress, we can slip back.
Q: In addition to being a researcher and professor, you’re also a mom raising three African American boys in Palo Alto, which is just 2% black. Does being an expert on bias help when confronting your own parental fears?
A: I think as parents we try to shield our children from things that we feel are too heavy for them to deal with, and sometimes I think we do that too much. We want to protect their innocence, but they’re not innocent. They’re absorbing all the same messages in the world around them. I think we should start talking to our children about these issues early and often. I really hope that this book can move us in that direction in some way, that it can open conversations and open eyes.
We keep thinking our work is done on this, without quite realizing that the work is never done.
Jessica Zack is a Bay Area freelance writer. Email: datebook@sfchronicle.com