Speaking of Psychology - Understanding your racial biases (SOP31)

Episode Date: November 13, 2015

Racial bias is everywhere but we may not always see it. However, understanding the way people feel about and behave toward those outside their own group can help communities heal after a tragedy, as well as prevent future ones, according to Yale University psychologist John Dovidio, PhD. APA is currently seeking proposals for APA 2020, click here to learn more https://convention.apa.org/proposals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Understanding our own racial biases is something we all struggle with, even when we aren't aware of those struggles. We speak with one psychologist who has been studying a more modern form of prejudice and says ridding ourselves of those biases is practically impossible. But being aware of them is the first step toward improving relations among different racial groups. I'm Audrey Hamilton, and this is speaking of psychology. John DeVito is a psychology professor at Yale University and one of the leading researchers on racism, particularly subtle or unconscious racism. He has studied issues of social power and social relations, both between groups and between individuals. His work explores techniques for reducing these conscious and unconscious biases. Welcome, Dr. DeVideo.

Thank you for having me. Your work focuses on what you call aversive racism. Can you explain what that means and how it differs from just one? racism? We used to think about racism in a very simple way, that people had negative thoughts, negative feelings, hatred towards a group. But since the 1960s, whether it was the civil rights legislation, it changed the way we thought about race because it was not only immoral to think that way, but it was illegal to discriminate.

And what we think is that racism has become more subtle since then, that people still have negative feelings, but they may not be aware of those negative feelings. and instead of feelings of hatred, it's more like feelings of avoidance and discomfort. That's where the name of verse of racism comes from. Would you say most people have some biases against people from different racial or ethnic groups? You know, what are the consequences of those types of implicit, or we say unconscious biases? Yeah. There's research that shows that only a small proportion of Americans today have old-fashioned kind of racism,

explicit kind of racism, but the majority of white Americans, because they've grown up in a culture that has been historically racist in many ways, because they're exposed to the media that associates violence, drugs, and poverty with certain groups, most white Americans, the majority of white Americans, about two-thirds to three-quarters, have these unconscious, implicit racial biases. How do people work on getting rid of these biases if they don't know they're biased? That's the biggest challenge because most of us are really well practiced at convincing ourselves that we're not prejudiced. So most of us want to be good people. Prejudice is bad.

And when we think about it, we always do the right thing. One of the consequences of aversive racism or unconscious bias is that you don't discriminate in a situation where what's right and wrong is clearly defined. Because you know what you're supposed to do when you do it. But it usually happens when you can justify a response on the basis of some factor other than race. So there may be like two people that you're interviewing, one white and one black, and you shift your criteria for the job in a way that actually favors the white person without actually directly discriminating against it. So the problem is every time we look at our behavior and monitor our behavior,

we behave in egalitarian way. and it's only when we're not paying attention that we discriminate. And so to your question, what we have to do is probably, if something's unconscious, you don't know you have it. It's that simple. So you can't think about what you're really feeling, but what you have to do is assume that you probably have these biases if you're an average American.

And then what you have to do is try to control those biases in the way you behave towards people. you often have to acknowledge that you may have these biases. So it's an ongoing battle because you can't really get rid of these. They're like habits of mind that we've grown up with. And so you just have to work at being always alert, always conscious, and always receptive to the possibility that we might be biased. I hear a lot about when you're eliminating these biases.

A lot of it is just about having conversations about race in general, maybe with people who are not your racial or ethnic background. Do you think that that helps sort of uncover these biases that you don't know you have? Yeah. One of the problem with averse of racism that I mentioned before is that you actually avoid the group. Okay. And you avoid the group because they make you uncomfortable, and you can therefore maintain your stereotypes of the group.

If you have a lot of interaction with members of the group, then you no longer think about it. about people as being a member of that group primarily. You think about them as individuals. And so you haven't really gotten rid of the implicit bias, but you've been able to fine-tune the way you interact with many different people. And you just develop a broader array of repertoire

of being able to interact with people and understand them. What do psychologists like you who study this, think about the election and reelection of President Obama, have race relations and attitudes changed in this country since he became president? There's been some amazing changes in terms of attitudes since he's become president, but there's also been a real persistence of racism. In terms of changing of attitudes, it probably has happened among the black community because

there are new role models. Blacks can envision a new future. Blacks can be at the center rather than the periphery. But many of the issues that you saw with Obama in terms of objections to him, the questions about where he was born is a reflection of averse of racism where a black person in that position of power can't be legitimate in that position of power. And so you look for reasons to try to devalue or get rid of that person. The other thing is that many of his policies have been opposed in ways that are much more

virulent than many other presidents. I think it's a part because those negative racial attitudes get expressed, get channeled in a way that has a higher intensity. Have psychologists been studying this? I mean, in the last, I guess it's sort of an ongoing experiment of the last eight years of his presidency. Over the last eight years, there have been some changes in implicit racial bias, but not widespread. So a study, too, will find a difference, particularly soon after the election. election because it was so revolutionary at the time in terms of thinking.

And we had just stopped thinking to revolutionary things. But when you go back to business as usual, we still grow up in a society that makes these associations. And he's seen really as an exception rather than what the average black person is. Let's move on to the topic of law enforcement. What can law enforcement officers and their leaders learn from your research when it comes to training and interacting with their communities, specifically minority communities. The research on police offices, well, in general, they started doing some research with

different computer simulation games where you would shoot and not shoot somebody that appeared on a screen and that person either had a gun or had an object like a wallet. And then you would have to make a decision do you shoot or not shoot that person. And what that research found was two things. One was that people were much more likely to shoot an unarmed black person than an unarmed white person. And second of all, implicit bias predicted that result. There's this, on average, this kind of shooter bias.

And this shooter bias is related to implicit attitudes. And work with police officers show that they show the same bias. that it is related to their implicit attitudes as well. The more they are exposed in their daily activity to black violence, the police officers, the more likely they are to show this kind of bias. So what it talks about is that nobody wants to shoot an unarmed person. That's not our intentions. But what it shows is if you have these very quick associations of blacks with crime and violence,

if you're well trained in your profession, it makes you susceptible to making a split-second decision that you can never take back. How do they go about eliminating those biases, or is that even possible? Yeah, I'm not a big fan of trying to eliminate the biases. You know, biases that are 50 years in the making, you don't unmake in a very short time. Okay. But one example, I do some work with police forces indirectly through. an organization I'm part of, but one of the things that they said was that police officers

today aren't like the image we had of police officers in the past walking the beat. The police officers today are in a car that has so much electronics that they don't have to get out of their car. Someone even told me, I don't know if this is actually true, but I bet it is, that there's more electronics, high power electronics in the average police car today than there was in our first space shots. So what that means is the police officers are in the car and don't interact with the community. And the community sees the police officers as distant and powerful over them.

And you can't be an effective police officer unless you have the trust and cooperation of the community. So what they've tried to do now, and we've recommended this in several places, was to basically get the police officer out of the car, just as you said before, to meet the people. as individuals to be able to distinguish one from the other and therefore not overreact. Okay, Dr. DeVito, thank you so much for joining us. It's been such a pleasure. It's been a pleasure for me too. Thank you. For more information on Dr. DeVito's work and to hear more episodes,

please go to our website, speakingofpsychology.org. With the American Psychological Association's Speaking of Psychology, I'm Audrey Hamilton.