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Explicit biases are well-understood and easily recognized.\u00a0 Hate speech, burning crosses, racial slurs, sexist language — all draw attention and invite rebuke.\u00a0 Implicit biases, however, bubble away beneath the surface of conscious thought, unacknowledged and provoking largely involuntary responses, some of which may be miniscule or fleeting but which nonetheless nudge our behavior and influence our decisions.<\/p>\n
Because these unconscious attitudes exert such power over our behavior, they have come under academic scrutiny in recent years.\u00a0 Researchers at Harvard have developed the Implicit Association Test (IAT) which measures our tendency to associate ideas with each other. You might associate “kiwi” with fruit, or you might associate it with “don’t like” : either way, the test measures your tendency to prefer kiwi to other foods, and fruit to other foods.\u00a0 Your feelings about fruit are fairly innocuous. Far more interesting are the tests that measure our implicit associations between women, men, family, and career — a strong association between men and career may indicate implicit bias toward maleness in the job environment; this could play out in interviews or employee evaluations in ways that we aren’t even aware of.\u00a0\u00a0Equally interesting (or scary, depending on your results) are the IATs dealing with race and whether we associate goodness or badness with a particular race.\u00a0 It’s not hard to see how these might manifest themselves in a classroom setting, either through discipline, subjective grading practices, identification for special programs like GT or SPED, or simply through the thousands of everyday interactions between a child and a teacher.<\/p>\n
Even more astonishing is the finding that what we say we believe about race doesn’t always or even usually align with our implicit biases.\u00a0\u00a0We like to think we are color blind, but the IAT makes it hard to maintain that position.<\/p>\n