© CLIPAREA/ShutterstockNeurologists claim your biases are located in an exact part of the brain called the amygdala.
"Implicit bias" seems to be everywhere. What is it? "Bias," to your average layperson, seems to mean something like prejudice or
discrimination. "Implicit" is usually taken to mean
unconscious or outside of awareness. So "implicit bias" is, supposedly, something like
prejudices of which people are not even aware.
However, the research on so-called implicit bias has its
serious critics.
Almost everything about implicit bias is controversial in scientific circles. It is not clear what most implicit methods actually measure; their ability to predict discrimination is modest at best, their reliability is low; early claims about their power and immutability have proven unjustified. And yet colleges and corporations have been rushing to institute
"implicit bias trainings" in (
misguided and unlikely to be effective) attempts to reduce discrimination.
Over the last few months, I have had several interesting exchanges with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji, one of the most prominent psychological scientists working in the area of implicit methods, beliefs, attitudes, prejudices, and biases. She, along with Dr. Tony Greenwald, created the concept of implicit bias, which has caught on like wildfire, and was even mentioned in a
Hillary Clinton election speech.
Comment: It's a slippery slope when governments begin to intervene in families. While many would agree that removing a child from terrorist supporting families is necessary to protect the child's welfare, there is the possibility that such measures, once normalized, will be used as a basis for further state intervention. We are already seeing instances where children are removed from caring parents simply because they disagree with mandatory vaccinations or gender dysphoria - the state is slowly increasing its reach to the point where parents have less and less say over what happens to their own children. Where will the lines be drawn and who will be making those decisions?