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ADVANCES


12 Scientific American, April 2019

SOURCE: “PATTERNS OF IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT ATTITUDES, VOL. I: LONG-TERM CHANGE AND STABILITY FROM 2007 TO 2016,”
BY TESSA E. S. CHARLESWORTH AND MAHZARIN R. BANAJI, IN

PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE,

VOL. 30, NO. 2; FEBRUARY 2019

Graphic by Amanda Montañez

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Sexuality

Race

Skin tone

Age

Disability
Body weight

2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016

Neutral

More biased
(toward typically
preferred group)


Implicit Association Test Score

Explicit Preference Score
Test showed
images of faces

Test showed
images of bodies

Researchers analyzed data from
4.4 million implicit bias tests
completed by U.S. participants, controlling
for factors such as the time of year the test was taken.
Higher test scores indicate stronger implicit preferences
for straight, white, light-skinned, young, nondisabled
or thin people. Scores for the body weight test shifted
around 2011, when researchers started showing
silhouettes of bodies rather than faces.

Participants’ explicit biases were
assessed by asking them to select
statements expressing how much they favored
one group over another, such as “I strongly prefer
young people to old people.”

Implicit Bias Explicit Bias

Average monthly scores
(light lines)

Trends with seasonal adjustments
(bold lines)

PSYCHOLOGY

Biases Aren’t


Forever


Implicit prejudice against
certain groups is declining

Psychologists have lots of evidence that
implicit social biases—our unconscious,
knee-jerk attitudes associated with specific
races, sexes and other categories—are
widespread, and many assumed they do
not evolve. The feelings are just too deep.
But a new study finds that over roughly the
past decade, both implicit and explicit, or
conscious, attitudes toward several social
groups have grown warmer.
The study used data from a standard
test of implicit attitudes collected via a Web
site called Project Implicit. Participants
were asked to quickly press a certain com-
puter key in response to positive words,
such as “happy,” and a different key in re -
sponse to negative words, such as “tragic,”
that appeared on a screen. These words

were interspersed with images or words
that represented two categories of people,
such as blacks and whites, and participants
were asked to flag these using the same
keys. Faster reactions when, for example,
black rather than white faces shared a key
with negative words suggested a racial bias.
Tessa Charlesworth and Mahzarin
Ba naji, psychologists at Harvard Universi-
ty, analyzed more than four million results
collected over a 10-year period from U.S.
adults who had taken implicit association
tests for sexuality, race, skin tone (in which
faces differ in color but not shape), age,
disability and body weight. Respondents
also answered questions on the screen
asking them to explicitly rate how much
they liked people in each of the categories.
In line with previous findings, explicit
bias decreased in all six categories from
2007 through 2016; the drop ranged from
49 percent (for sexuality) to 15 percent (for
body weight). But more surprisingly,
implicit bias also decreased—by 33 percent
for sexuality, 17 percent for race and 15 per-
cent for skin tone ( graphic ). Most of the
reductions occurred in all generations, the

researchers reported in a study published
online in January in Psychological Science.
“It’s a really cool paper,” says Keith Payne,
a psychologist at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has found sim-
ilar bias reductions in his own work. “I think
it’s going to start a lot of conversations.”
Charlesworth and Banaji also found,
however, that implicit biases about age and
disability did not change over time, and
those against overweight people nudged
up by 5 percent.
Several factors might explain the dis-
crepancies among categories, the research-
ers say. In their data set, implicit biases for
race, skin tone and sexuality were lower to
begin with than those for age, disability and
body weight. And the types of implicit biases
that decreased the most are also the biases
that have received more societal attention.
Meanwhile the stigma associated with
obesity may have increased in recent years.
Next, the team plans to explore implicit
and explicit attitude change across demo-
graphics and geographical regions, as well as
whether trends have changed since the 2016
U.S. presidential election. — Matthew Hutson
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