Biased Main Ideas

Racism 

Eberhardt begins Biased by drawing a tentative distinction between implicit bias and racism, but she shows throughout her book that the former can feed the latter. More specifically, she argues that racism and implicit bias have a reciprocal relationship, with racist rhetoric and imagery becoming part of the data that people use to understand the world. In Chapter 4, Eberhardt offers the example of a German-born police officer who “learned” the association between blackness and criminality during his time on an American police force. Though he was not immersed in US racial rhetoric growing up, he nonetheless took cues from the behavior of those around him. This learning of stereotypical associations, in turn, leads to structural inequities when Black men are policed more heavily and sentenced more severely than their white counterparts.  

This same principle means that racist ideas can have a kind of afterlife in popular consciousness long after most would be embarrassed to express them openly. Eberhardt’s clearest example here is the “black-ape association,” a mainstay of crude caricatures and jokes that have gradually become less acceptable in public discourse. “Scientific” attempts to establish some racial groups as more evolved than others were once widely endorsed but have long since been dismissed as misguided. Yet Eberhardt and her fellow researchers find that, around the world, even those who disavow racism often make a subconscious connection between apes and people of African descent. Again, even when implicitly held, this idea can bias the holder in favor of disproportionately harsh treatment for Black people. 

Social Justice

By recognizing and addressing implicit bias, Eberhardt suggests people can make greater progress toward social justice. Since Biased is about bias and its consequences, many of the examples Eberhardt cites are in the negative; they are situations in which justice is not being served because of unchallenged stereotypes and prejudices. In fact, Part II of the book leads the reader on a tour of the ways in which bias distorts the law enforcement and criminal justice systems in the United States—the very systems in which impartiality is most essential. Eberhardt shows, for instance, how bias leads to circular reasoning in policing: when police departments view Black communities as crime-prone, they patrol those communities more heavily and make more arrests. The high numbers of arrests, often for victimless “nuisance crimes” like underage drinking, are then used as justification to continue over-policing Black neighborhoods. Similar vicious cycles result in incarceration and sentencing practices and in the decision to use deadly force. 

However, Eberhardt is clear that things don’t have to be this way and that inherent cognitive biases don’t have to translate into an inherently unjust world. The third and final part of Biased showcases several areas in which individuals, governments, and companies are making progress to undo the harms of biased decision-making. The common theme in those examples is awareness: When people are made conscious of the potential for bias, they are more likely to avoid biased decisions. They are less likely to view a Black passerby as a “suspicious person” in their neighborhood or to go with gut impressions when deciding which motorists to stop for a minor traffic infraction. This, in turn, undermines the tacit support that implicit bias can provide for other, more flagrant types of bias. 

Intelligence vs. Intuition

Another key point Eberhardt makes is that intuitive judgment calls are often more prone to implicit bias. The faster and more subjective a decision is, the less time there is to weigh facts and double-check perceptions, and the more bias comes into play. Many of the experiments recorded in Biased illustrate this result by having subjects work under rapid-fire conditions or even subliminally exposing them to words and images. People who would never consciously make a bigoted remark or condone a discriminatory policy find themselves subtly relying on the “black-crime association” or the “black-ape association” as they examine pictures for threats or evaluate the behavior of police on videos. These associative links are partly a product of cultural exposure and partly a product of the brain’s tendency to categorize, and they are hard to override. 

Consequently, many of Eberhardt’s recommendations for fighting the ill effects of bias involve slowing down and relying less on intuition. In Chapter 5, she points out that traffic stops are less bias-prone and less likely to escalate when police observe a uniform standard of respectful language toward motorists. Online, as shown through the example of Nextdoor in Chapter 7, the requirement to stop and think before reporting a “suspicious person” gives people much-needed time to determine whether their suspicions are based on more than unconscious biases. Likewise, on the job, a reliance on objective, measurable outcomes limits the scope of managers’ (often biased) intuition about who is a good candidate for a new position or promotion (Chapter 10). Intuition is a part of human intelligence, often a valuable one. However, Eberhardt contends that the truly intelligent course of action is to be more methodical and less reliant on intuition when people’s lives, livelihoods, or futures are at stake.