Biased Summary and Analysis

Summary: Introduction and Part I: What Meets the Eye  

Introduction 

Eberhardt begins Biased by recounting a training session she led on police–community relations at the Oakland Police Department. To explain the pervasiveness of racial bias and the “black-crime association” specifically, she shares two stories. The first concerns her then–five-year-old son, who automatically feared and distrusted a Black passenger on an airplane but could not explain why. The second comes from a Black police officer who, while working undercover, ended up mistaking his own reflection for a potentially dangerous individual. These examples, Eberhardt says, show how even Black individuals end up internalizing the stereotype that conflates their race with criminal behavior. 

Chapter 1: Seeing Each Other 

This chapter begins with Eberhardt briefly recalling her childhood move from a predominantly Black neighborhood to a primarily white one. She describes her struggle to put names to faces in this new social environment, a phenomenon known to psychologists as the “other-race effect.” Difficulty in recognizing people of another race is, Eberhardt says, “a function of biology and exposure,” not necessarily a reflection of a bigoted worldview. Phenomena like these, she proceeds to explain, led to her interest in the psychology of racial biases, something she now studies as a professor at Stanford. Eberhardt cites a string of robberies in Oakland’s Chinatown to show how the other-race effect can crop up even when the stakes are high—for instance, when trying to identify a criminal suspect. 

Chapter 2: Nurturing Bias 

Next, Eberhardt looks at some of the factors—biological as well as cultural—that allow bias to arise. She describes the brain’s efficiency at categorization and points out that much of the time, it is useful to be able to make quick decisions about what belongs in what category. This tendency causes trouble, however, when the brain’s shorthand way of grouping things turns into stereotypes and prejudices about groups of people. Eberhardt cites studies in which participants respond differently to pictures based on information about the subject’s race and describes a tool known as the implicit association test (IAT), which allows for the measurement of implicit biases. She also describes the origins of the word stereotype in the work of journalist Walter Lippmann (1889–1974). As the chapter closes, Eberhardt asks the reader to reflect on the prevalence of bias and the possibility of controlling its impact. 

Analysis: Introduction and Part I: What Meets the Eye 

Throughout the early chapters of her book, Eberhardt is emphatic that “implicit bias is not a new way of calling someone a racist.” In fact, one major focus of Biased is the universal and inherent nature of bias. The other-race effect, for instance, has been demonstrated in people of many different racial and ethnic identities: the human brain, it seems, is simply predisposed to make finer distinctions among the people that one spends the most time with. Eberhardt is candid about her own difficulty, as a middle schooler, in telling her white classmates apart, a point that shows that the effect is not a product of prejudice or privilege. Biases, Eberhardt argues throughout, are a cognitive feature of the human mind, not a moral failing in themselves. The moral question is whether we can recognize and counteract our biases to make fairer and more equitable decisions.  

At the same time, Eberhardt is clear that although biases are a fundamental quality of human psychology, biased thinking does not have the same practical effects on all groups. Racial bias, which provides most of the book’s examples, has a more profound negative effect on some groups than others. A key example of this, the “black-crime association,” is briefly described in the introduction and Chapter 1 but is expounded on more fully in Chapters 3 (“A Bad Dude”) and 4 (“Male Black”).