Key Findings and Implications:
- Social behavior is often shaped by implicit biases. These patterns of spontaneous or unconscious judgments emerge in language use, hiring practices, education success, and policing behavior.
- While brief interventions can reduce a person’s scores on implicit bias tests, these changes appear to be temporary, and they don’t necessarily reduce discrimination in the longer term.
- Coupled with organizational policy change, behavioral and cognitive strategies can help people “work around” their biases and make more equitable decisions in the long term.
As a college freshman, Dr. Calvin Lai heard a new term in his introductory psychology class, and it caught his attention. “I learned about this concept called ‘implicit bias’ — about all these subtle, hidden ways that people might express bias in the face of things like race and gender, without ever knowing it.” In grade school, he had mostly been taught that racism and sexism were overt and explicit, even sanctioned through state policies. “Learning about implicit bias helped connect the dots and clarify all of these experiences I had had around race and gender.”
Today, with his Diversity Science lab at Rutgers University, Dr. Lai describes implicit biases as “spontaneous or unconscious mental processes that create a gap between what people value (e.g., racial equality) and what people do (e.g., racial discrimination).” The resulting behaviors rarely look like blatant discrimination, but more like subtle acts of aversion or favoritism. A school principal unknowingly assigns harsher consequences to students of color. A hiring manager inadvertently interviews a disproportionate number of men because they all feel so qualified.
Since Dr. Lai started graduate school in 2010, he has seen (and driven) many changes in the psychological understanding of implicit bias. Over three decades ago, social cognition researchers began to develop tests that indirectly measured a person’s degree of favoritism or apprehension towards members of a given social group. Millions of participants have now completed these measures, and in the meantime, the general public has grown much more aware of hidden discrimination, “these more indirect routes by which inequality is perpetuated.”
Dr. Lai entered the field as this important “first generation” of bias research — defining a problem and raising awareness — was ready for its next phase: applying and testing the promising bias-reducing interventions developed in psychology labs.
To Dr. Lai’s surprise, these tools did not work as intended. First, interventions designed to reduce implicit biases tended to have short-term effects that wore off within minutes or hours. (He compares implicit bias to a heartrate: Our activity shifts it momentarily, but it quickly returns to its baseline levels.) Even more fundamentally, his team’s findings suggested that changes on implicit bias measures did not directly predict changes in discriminatory behaviors in the real world.
“My initial reaction as a grad student was to be quite jaded,” he reflects. “But the realization I’ve landed on is that there are a lot of additional variables that come between that intervention in a vacuum and people actually applying the intervention in their daily life. And to bridge the gap, you actually have to study the gap.” To Dr. Lai, this involves asking questions like: What makes someone motivated to engage in a bias-reducing intervention? How do social environments reinforce someone’s existing biases as soon as an intervention is over?
These days, Dr. Lai is less invested in figuring out how to change scores on implicit bias tests. He spends much more of his time equipping individuals and communities to work around these biases and make more equitable decisions. “We’re interested in real-world maneuvers that can influence long-term behavioral change.”
Dr. Lai’s work blurs the lines between mechanisms research, intervention development, and implementation science. “I often have an ‘educator mindset’ in thinking about interventions,” Dr. Lai notes, the likely influence of his early-career work as a diversity trainer. Education about implicit bias is, unsurprisingly, fundamental to many of the interventions Dr. Lai’s team has developed and tested. In addition, these interventions teach new skills that directly translate to behaviors within a particular context. His research with school-based clinicians, for example, suggests that bias-management strategies like challenging stereotypes and proactively considering a student’s perspective can support better collaboration with students of color. Other effective interventions occur at the organizational level, like policies that reduce the impact of bias on hiring decisions.
Dr. Lai’s collaborators include groups as diverse as corporate leaders and police departments. Methodologically speaking, organization-level partnerships allow his team to assess the impacts of individual intervention alongside the impacts of policy and culture change. Often, too, he finds that participants have more buy-in (and even greater trust in the scientific process) when they can participate in intervention development, helping design tools that are maximally relevant to their own contexts. These collaborations thrive, Dr. Lai says, when they are grounded in the practicalities of participants’ day-to-day roles and in the values they most treasure. “Police officers, judges, lawyers — many of them are motivated by racial equity. Almost all of us care about being fair and about doing a good job.”
For his work equipping individuals and organizations to act more equitably, FABBS is delighted to present Dr. Calvin Lai with the Early Career Impact Award.
