The SIPS DEI Council is open to anyone in the SIPS community who would like to participate in building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community in our school through monthly online meetings and working groups on various topics.  New voices, viewpoints and energy are always welcome.  For more information, email: sips-dicouncil@cornell.edu.

The Language of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: What is ‘Implicit Bias?’

What follows is from the Cornell AgriTech DEI Bulletin.  Many thanks to our colleagues Anna Katharine Mansfield and Amara Dunn-Silver, Cornell AgriTech DEI Council co-chairs, who are taking such a strong lead with their DEI efforts. They write, like any group, DEI practitioners use jargon as a shortcut to convey specific meanings that may be unclear or confusing to anyone unfamiliar with the terms. As part of our DEI Bulletin series, we are exploring some key terms used to describe important DEI concepts. If there’s a term you’d like us to explore, contact Anna Katharine or Amara, or you can submit a suggestion anonymously.

Implicit biases are the subconscious views we hold about other people based on the way they look, speak, act, think, believe, etc. Humans continuously take in a huge amount of information from the world around us that we automatically process without conscious thought.

Unfortunately, this automatic processing means that our brains associate some groups of people with negative characteristics, or even as threats. Rather than recognizing a particular person as a fellow human being, a unique individual who holds many identities simultaneously, your brain notices a particular identity, then uses that as a shortcut to categorize them. As a result, you might think, speak, or act in a particular way towards that person, without realizing it.

This can show up in many different ways. It can lead people to preferentially offer interviews to job applicants with names that sound White instead of Black. It can result in academic advisors using different words to describe equally-qualified male and female students when writing recommendation letters. It can even lead to racial disparities in healthcare, literally a matter of life and death.

We all have implicit biases, which research suggests we absorb from the societies and cultures around us. Psychology professor Mahzarin Banaji describes this as “the thumbprint of our culture.”[1]  None of us can help the implicit biases we absorbed, and they don’t make us bad humans – but understanding our own biases can help us treat others more equitably. There is disagreement about the extent to which an individual’s implicit bias predicts their own biased behavior, but evidence suggests that overt bias in a community can be predicted by the implicit biases of individual community members.

What you can do about implicit bias

• Identify your own implicit biases. The nature of implicit bias is that it is hidden, but there’s an easy-to-use tool that can help make invisible biases visible. The Implicit Association Test was designed to empirically measure biases around many identities and ideologies. For an explanation of how the test works and some additional context for reflecting on the test and your results, you might enjoy listening to (or reading the transcript from) this episode of the podcast Hidden Brain.
• Notice how these implicit biases show up. When do you notice yourself making snap judgements about people? Where in your life – in or out of work – does implicit bias have the potential to influence your behavior? How could it impact your interactions with co-workers, supervisors or supervisees, students, job applicants, extension audiences, neighbors, etc.?
• Make a plan to circumvent your implicit biases. Implicit biases can lead us to speak or act unfairly before we notice it. Research shows that we likely cannot change our biases, but we can reduce the impact of our biases on our behavior. When you are in a situation where you know your implicit biases could influence your behavior, pause. This gives you time to consciously align your behavior with your values, rather than automatically acting from your biases. Can you implement other practices around how you mentor, teach, conduct interviews, or do extension work that help you override your implicit biases?

At AgriTech we grow things, including our ability to recognize and address our own biases.

[1] Quoted in: In the Air We Breathe, Hidden Brain podcast.