Over 85 percent of all Americans consider themselves to be unprejudiced, reject stereotypes and support anti-discrimination efforts. But our brains work primarily on the unconscious level, and we only have conscious access to 5 percent of our brains. At this unconscious level, the majority of people in the United States hold some degree of implicit racial or gender bias—negative associations held unconsciously within almost all of our minds.
Explicit bias is one’s attitudes and beliefs on a conscious level. Implicit bias is the bias in behavior or judgment that stems from subtle cognitive processes that often operate at a level below conscious awareness and without intentional control. Implicit bias research developed from the study of attitudes. As we in the legal profession have often found in jury selection, bias researchers also realized that asking subjects to tell them about their biases did not result in credible data. This is because individuals will not often provide responses that they fear will be perceived as discriminatory or socially undesirable.
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