Activity 3: Unconscious Bias

Activity 3: Where do I fit in? Unconscious Bias

While there are plenty of cases of overt racial profiling, one of the subtlest types of racial bias in policing is one that the officer isn’t even aware of. These biases, sometimes called unconscious biases or implicit biases, do not depend on the officer holding racist views or racist suspicions about Black people or other people of color. Rather, implicit bias studies show that sudden reactions, such as when an officer is faced with an attacker, can reveal secret prejudices that the officer holds. In timed tests with subjects who were expected to react as quickly as possible, giving them no time to reflect on their attitudes, psychologists have shown that officers are quicker to assume that Black people are armed and dangerous than are white people (Correll et al., 2007).

Unconscious or implicit biases take over in these situations, and officers unknowingly decide that a Black person is threatening and not a white person. Equally important, these biases are not unique to police officers. We all have some unconscious biases that shape how we interact with others, especially other people who are from different racial or ethnic backgrounds. In a country like America, where there is a great deal of racial segregation and cultural stereotypes in the media, it only makes sense that many of us hold racial prejudices that we’re unaware of, regardless of how “un-racist” we might like to think we are. White Americans may assume that Latino people are immigrants when they may have lived in the United States since before it even existed, or white Americans might assume that Native Americans have alcohol problems or engage in other types of antisocial behavior. Police are, of course, as much as anybody else likely to hold these stereotypes. While it’s not clear what the significance of this is for understanding the nature of racial profiling, powerful data shows how complicated and deeply rooted racial prejudice is in policing and across America more broadly.

While it is not a “trigger-based” study, you can take an online test of your own unconscious racial biases at www.understanding prejudice.org and see how you compare to others.

1. How did you do on this test? 
2. Does it make you think differently about your own assumptions about race? Do you think that there might be ways to address such unconscious biases?

Learn more about the Criminal (In)Justice: A Critical Introduction, Second Edition: