Unravelling Implicit Biases: Research Evidenceec.europa.eu/research/pdf/workshop_igb/gloria... ·...

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Unravelling Implicit Biases: Research Evidence Gloria Origgi and Anke Lipinsky Workshop on Implicit Biases European Commission Bruxelles, May 30th éà&è

Transcript of Unravelling Implicit Biases: Research Evidenceec.europa.eu/research/pdf/workshop_igb/gloria... ·...

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Unravelling Implicit Biases: Research Evidence

Gloria Origgi and Anke Lipinsky

Workshop on Implicit Biases

European Commission

Bruxelles, May 30th éà&è

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Royal Society: Understanding Unconscious Biases

https://youtu.be/dVp9Z5k0dEE

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What is a Bias?

• The term "bias," sometimes referred to as

"response bias," denotes a displacement of

people's responses along a continuum of

possible judgments.

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Is it always bad ?

• Not always. Most of our judgments depend on heuristics that are biased (cf. Kahneman, Gigerenzer)

• Heuristics are frugal—that is, they ignore part of the information” (Gigerenzer 2008).

• This ignorance can actually be helpful especially when one needs to make immediate judgments in the face of an abundance of data and it is not at all obvious what the ideal approach to assessing the information might be.

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When are biases wrong?

• When they are based on wrong stereotypes, attitudes and prejudices such as gender, racial, ethnic stereotypes, attitudes and prejudices that undermine the representative features of a group.

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Distinction between attitudes, stereotypes and prejudices

• Implicit Attitudes are evaluative dispositions, that is the tendency to like or dislike

someone or something

• A social stereotype is a mental association between a social category and a trait. Stereotypes

denote cognitive structures that help individuals to process information (perceiving,

decoding, storing, retrieving, decision making). They are defined as morally “neutral”, just a

cognitive resource to gather and process information.

• Prejudice denotes a kind of motivated cognitive bias, characterized by: stereotypes and

attributions (causal explanations of actions and events connected to the group) that

represent a group in a negative light; negative affects that appear to be merited by these

stereotypes and attributions; and discriminatory behaviour that reflects these affects (two

dimensions: competence and warmth (Fiske))

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Biases can depend on

stereotypes

prejudices

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Examples

• Attitudes: Homophily (cf. Helmer et al. eLife 2017 on Gender Biases in Scholarly Peer Review)

• Stereotypes: Implicit Associations

• Prejudices: Implicit negative constructs

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Examples of Biases

• The “Right-Hand” Google bias: When YouTube launched the video upload feature for their app, 5-10% of videos were uploaded upside-down, and Google developers were baffled. Could such a large percentage of users be shooting their videos incorrectly? “Incorrectly” was the key word. Google engineers had inadvertently designed the app for right-handed users. They never considered the fact that phones are usually rotated 180 degrees when held in a user’s left hand.

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Examples of Biases

• The Perfect Candidate: Résumés are a consistent source of unconscious bias. One particular study gave a group of managers a set of résumés. Some of them were exact duplicates where only the names had been changed. Résumés with the Anglo sounding names received substantially more callbacks that those with diverse names of other origins. Clearly it was the names and their associated biases that impacted the decisions instead of the qualifications and value they could bring to the company.

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Gender Biases

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Gender biases

• Gender biases can be more or less implicit, more or less based on

prejudices and negative evaluative attitudes. We concentrate on the

implicit biases that are at work in many “neutral” contexts and affect

men and women as well (women show the same implicit gender

biases than men).

• Specific gender implicit biases affect many dimensions of the male/female distinctions

1.Psychological features: men are more action-prone, women are more prudent; men are more risk-prone,

women are more risk averse; men are more rational, women are more emotional, men are more systematic,

women are more empathic, men are better in spatial tasks than women, Men are more selfish, women are more generous.

2.Social role features: Men are apt for technical jobs, women for jobs related to “care”; men are better in

scientific studies, women are better in liberal arts studies; men are more apt for leadership, women are better

for human resources issues

3.Physical features: men are stronger, taller, faster than women…

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HOW TO AVOID SEX AND GENDER BIASES? STRATEGIES AND METHODS

• “Making them explicit”: that is, creating an awareness that allows us to control our biases.

This is not always true. Research shows (cf. Kahneman 2010) that we have two modes of

thinking : “fast” and “slow”.

• Unified theory of implicit social cognition: a methodology (Greenwald 2002) which uses a

cognitive balance principle to predict development of associations between concepts (such as

science and self) that are both associated to the same third concept (e.g., male). The development

of associations is a strong predictor of the presence of a bias.

• Encourage alternative associations:

• Encourage alternative behaviors::

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5 AVAILABLE ONLINE RESOURCES

1. IMPLICIT SOCIAL COGNITION, INVESTIGATING THE GAP BETWEEN INTENTIONS AND ACTIONS (HARVARD UNIVERSITY)

2. UNDERSTANDING UNCONSCIOUS BIAS, THE ROYAL SOCIETY (2015)

3. REDUCING STEREOTYPE THREAD

4. TUTORIALS FOR CHANGE, GENDER SCHEMAS AND SCIENCE CAREERS (HUNTER COLLEGE)

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6 OTHER RELEVANT RESOURCES

• VADEMECUM ON GENDER EQUALITY IN HORIZON 2020

• IMPLICIT BIAS AND PHILOSOPHY

• STANFORD ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY

• GENDERED INNOVATIONS DATABASE

• GENDERPORTAL.EU

• TOOLKIT GENDER IN EU-FUNDED RESEARCH