A Journey into the World of Implicit Bias

I took an implicit bias test that compared European Americans and Hispanic Americans with ‘Good’ and ‘Bad.’ According to the results of the test, I was faster at sorting out ‘European Americans’ with ‘Bad’, and ‘Hispanic Americans’ with ‘Good’. With that said, I would highlight the Scientific American article that specifically highlights that “the stability of the test is low, meaning that if you take the same test a few weeks apart, you might score differently. And the correlation between a person’s IAT scores and discriminatory behavior is often small.” By no means do I dispute the existence of implicit biases. However, I seriously doubt the usefulness of this type of test when writings about them highlight their lack of stability. When you deal with economics, economists typically find survey material to be the lowest form of data and prefer to use other numerical methods to distill a person, or group of people’s behavior based on their actual actions, rather than how they report their actions and beliefs to be. While this test is not a direct survey, I view its reliability as the lowest form of data available surrounding this topic, especially when the results of these tests do not even correlate to discriminatory behavior. Because we live in a world of patterns, our minds are made to generalize in order to streamline operational processing in our brains and to survive better in a world full of millions of individual stimuli. Since implicit biases are connected to generalizations, I think that being aware of your beliefs and how they affect our day-to-day decisions is important. Once again, because of how we are wired, no one can live this way all the time, but we can try to bring a level of intentionality to the things we do and the decisions we make. I find it useful to try to understand the underlying assumptions and motivations behind many of the choices I make in my life. Looking back to the hiring and interview process we focused on this week, I think the better strategy here, and in a lot of other key areas within HR management is not necessarily to try and eliminate all forms of implicit biases. Rather, as our lecture and reading materials highlighted, I believe it is more effective to create standardized processes that work to minimize or eliminate the ability for present biases to impact the results of key decisions. When you take the ability for bias to influence the final decision, I believe you end up with a better hire when it comes to the interview process, and a better decision, when it comes to other parts of the business.