ABSTRACT

“Implicit bias” denotes a prejudiced behaviour towards others exhibited by people who do not explicitly endorse biased stereotypes. The scientific study of implicit bias, primarily through measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT), has yielded two strange results. First, although in its ordinary use the term “implicit bias” and “unconscious bias” have been used interchangeably (Brownstein et al 2019), the scientific concept no longer includes unawareness in its meaning. Second, the low IAT test-retest reliability and the lack of correlations between IAT results and other biased behaviours, has caused such a crisis in social psychology that some have declared that implicit bias does not exist (Machery 2022). Yet what is at stake is not the IAT, but the biases in hiring, marking, and other practices in everyday life. Once we adopt a liberal, rather than a scientific naturalism, we can readily admit the reality of implicit bias as a puzzling phenomenon in the “manifest image” even if it does not show up in the “scientific image” to use Sellars’s terminology. We can, I shall argue, recover the phenomenon of implicit bias and its ordinary meaning, by accepting implicit bias as a form of the wider and non-scientific phenomenon of self-deception.

BIO

Talia Morag is a lecturer of philosophy at the University of Wollongong. Her main research interests are philosophical psychology, especially liberal naturalism and the philosophical foundations of psychoanalysis, the philosophy of emotion, ethics, and social psychology, as well as the philosophy of television. Her book Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason was published by Routledge (2016).

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