This dissertation is about prejudice. In particular, it examines the theoretical and ethical questions raised by research on implicit social biases. Social biases are termed "implicit" when they are not reported, though they lie just beneath the surface of consciousness. Such biases are easy to adopt but very difficult to introspect and control. Despite this difficulty, I argue that we are personally responsible for our biases and obligated to overcome them if they can bring harm to ourselves or to others. (...) My dissertation addresses the terms of their removal. It is grounded in a comprehensive examination of empirical research and, as such, is a contribution to social psychology. Although implicit social biases significantly influence our judgment and action, they are not reducible to beliefs or desires. Rather, they constitute a class of their own. Understanding their particular character is vital to determining how to replace them with more preferable habits of mind. I argue for a model of interpersonal fluency, a kind of ethical expertise that requires transforming our underlying dispositions of thought, feeling, and action. (shrink)

We can understand implicit bias as a person’s disposition to evaluate members of a social group in a less favorable light than members of another social group, without intending to do so. If we understand it this way, we should not presuppose a one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how implicit cognitive states lead to skewed evaluations of other people. The focus of this paper is on implicit bias in considered decisions. It is argued that we have good (...) reasons to assume that imagination plays a vital role in decision making. If this assumption is correct, it offers an explanation for implicit bias in many considered decisions: Human beings who have been frequently exposed to stereotypes have stereotype-congruent expectations as part of their background knowledge. They feed into their imagination, sometimes without their awareness. This model would allow us to explain the key characteristics of implicit bias without recurring to any unconscious attitudes over and above such background knowledge. (shrink)

Research on bias in peer review examines scholarly communication and funding processes to assess the epistemic and social legitimacy of the mechanisms by which knowledge communities vet and self-regulate their work. Despite vocal concerns, a closer look at the empirical and methodological limitations of research on bias raises questions about the existence and extent of many hypothesized forms of bias. In addition, the notion of bias is predicated on an implicit ideal that, once articulated, raises questions (...) about the normative implications of research on bias in peer review. This review provides a brief description of the function, history, and scope of peer review; articulates and critiques the conception of bias unifying research on bias in peer review; characterizes and examines the empirical, methodological, and normative claims of bias in peer review research; and assesses possible alternatives to the status quo. We close by identifying ways to expand conceptions and studies of bias to countenance the complexity of social interactions among actors involved directly and indirectly in peer review. (shrink)

If you care about securing knowledge, what is wrong with being biased? Often it is said that we are less accurate and reliable knowers due to implicit biases. Likewise, many people think that biases reflect inaccurate claims about groups, are based on limited experience, and are insensitive to evidence. Chapter 3 investigates objections such as these with the help of two popular metaphors: bias as fog and bias as shortcut. Guiding readers through these metaphors, I argue that they (...) clarify the range of knowledge-related objections to implicit bias. They also suggest that there will be no unifying problem with bias from the perspective of knowledge. That is, they tell us that implicit biases can be wrong in different ways for different reasons. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the metaphors reveal a deep—though perhaps not intractable—disagreement among theorists about whether implicit biases can be good in some cases when it comes to knowledge. (shrink)

Following Kahneman and Tversky, I examine the term ‘bias’ as it is used to refer to systematic errors. Given the central role of error in this understanding of bias, it is helpful to consider what it is to err and to distinguish different kinds of error. I identify two main kinds of error, examine ethical issues that pertain to the relation of these types of error, and explain their moral significance. Next, I provide a four-level explanatory framework for (...) understanding biases: personal, sub-personal, situational, and systemic levels. Finally, I examine some of the ethical complexities involved in attributing biases to oneself and to others. (shrink)

Although attentional bias is considered a key characteristic of anxiety problems, the psychometric properties of most AB measures are either problematic or unknown. We conducted two experiment...

Bernard Lonergan's cognitive theory challenges us to raise questions about both the cognitive process through which obesity is perceived as a behaviour change issue and the objectivity of such a moral judgment. Lonergan's theory provides the theoretical tools to affirm that anti-fat discrimination, in the United States of America and in many industrialized countries, is the result of both a group bias that resists insights into the good of other groups and a general bias of anti-intellectualism that tends (...) to set common sense against insights that require any thorough scientific analyses. While general bias diverts the public's attention away from the true aetiology of obesity, group bias sustains an anti-fat culture that subtly legitimates discriminatory practices and policies against obese people. Although anti-discrimination laws may seem to be a reasonable way of protecting obese and overweight individuals from discrimination, obesity bias can be best addressed by reframing the obesity debate from an environmental perspective from which tools and strategies to address both the social and individual determinants of obesity can be developed. Attention should not be concentrated on individuals' behaviour as it is related to lifestyle choices, without giving due consideration to the all-encompassing constraining factors which challenge the social and rational blindness of obesity bias. (shrink)

Health technology assessment (HTA) is often biased in the sense that it neglects relevant perspectives on the technology in question. To incorporate different perspectives in HTA, we should pursue agreement about what are relevant, plausible, and feasible research questions; interactive technology assessment (iTA) might be suitable for this goal. In this way a kind of procedural ethics is established. Currently, ethics too often is focussed on the application of general principles, which leaves a lot of confusion as to what really (...) is the matter in specific cases; in an iTA clashes of values should not be approached by use of such ethics. Instead, casuistry, as a tool used within the framework of iTA, should help to articulate and clarify what is the matter, as to make room for explication and consensus building. (shrink)

In a recent issue of this journal, Vandermassen suggested that feminists should include sexual selection theory and evolutionary psychology in a unifying theory of human nature. In response, this article aims to offer some insight into the development of sexual selection theory, to caution against Vandermassen's unreserved assimilation and to promote the opposite ongoing integration — an inclusion of gender perspectives into evolutionary biology. In society today, opinions about maintaining traditional sex roles are often put forward on the basis of (...) what is natural and how animals behave. However, the natural sciences have proved to be pervaded by gendered values and interests; Darwin's theory of sexual selection has been criticized for being male biased, and partly due to the unwillingness of Darwin's scientific contemporaries to accept female choice, research has been overwhelmingly focused on males. More recently, theory has become less gender biased and research has come to include a large variety of issues not present in the first version of the theory. However, there is a need to increase the awareness of gender bias in order to develop a gender-neutral evolutionary biology. (shrink)

To prevent ordinary people from being harmed by natural language processing (NLP) technology, finding ways to measure the extent to which a language model is biased (e.g., regarding gender) has become an active area of research. One popular class of NLP bias measures are bias benchmark datasets—collections of test items that are meant to assess a language model’s preference for stereotypical versus non-stereotypical language. In this paper, we argue that such bias benchmarks should be assessed with models (...) from the psychometric framework of item response theory (IRT). Specifically, we tie an introduction to basic IRT concepts and models with a discussion of how they could be relevant to the evaluation, interpretation and improvement of bias benchmark datasets. Regarding evaluation, IRT provides us with methodological tools for assessing the quality of both individual test items (e.g., the extent to which an item can differentiate highly biased from less biased language models) as well as benchmarks as a whole (e.g., the extent to which the benchmark allows us to assess not only severe but also subtle levels of model bias). Through such diagnostic tools, the quality of benchmark datasets could be improved, for example by deleting or reworking poorly performing items. Finally, in regards to interpretation, we argue that IRT models’ estimates for language model bias are conceptually superior to traditional accuracy-based evaluation metrics, as the former take into account more information than just whether or not a language model provided a biased response. (shrink)

The use of advanced AI and data-driven automation in the public sector poses several organisational, practical, and ethical challenges. One that is easy to underestimate is automation bias, which, in turn, has underappreciated legal consequences. Automation bias is an attitude in which the operator of an autonomous system will defer to its outputs to the point where the operator overlooks or ignores evidence that the system is failing. The legal problem arises when statutory office-holders (or their employees) either (...) fetter their discretion to in-house algorithms or improperly delegate their discretion to third-party software developers—something automation bias may facilitate. A synthesis of previous research suggests an easy way to mitigate the risks of automation bias and its potential legal ramifications is for those responsible for procurement decisions to adhere to a simple checklist that ensures that the pitfalls of automation are avoided as much as possible. (shrink)

Sally Haslanger has recently argued that philosophical focus on implicit bias is overly individualist, since social inequalities are best explained in terms of social structures rather than the actions and attitudes of individuals. I argue that questions of individual responsibility and implicit bias, properly understood, do constitute an important part of addressing structural injustice, and I propose an alternative conception of social structure according to which implicit biases are themselves best understood as a special type of structure.

Phillips & Silverstein emphasize the gain-control properties of NMDA synapses in cognitive coordination. We endorse their view and suggest that NMDA synapses play a crucial role in biased attentional competition and (visual) working memory. Our simulations show that NMDA synapses can control the storage rate of visual objects. We discuss specific predictions of our model about cognitive effects of NMDA-antagonists and schizophrenia.

Cesario's critiques and suggestions for redesigning social psychology experiments echo Dahl's call for developmental researchers to use experimental and naturalistic methods in a complementary manner for understanding children's development. We provide examples of how naturalistic observations can rectify Cesario's missing flaws for developmental studies investigating children's social biases and help researchers derive theories they can then experimentally test.

Multimodal integration is the formation of a coherent percept from different sensory inputs such as vision, audition, and somatosensation. Most research on multimodal integration in speech perception has focused on audio-visual integration. In recent years, audio-tactile integration has also been investigated, and it has been established that puffs of air applied to the skin and timed with listening tasks shift the perception of voicing by naive listeners. The current study has replicated and extended these findings by testing the effect of (...) air puffs on gradations of voice onset time along a continuum rather than the voiced and voiceless endpoints of the original work. Three continua were tested: bilabial (“pa/ba”), velar (“ka/ga”), and a vowel continuum (“head/hid”) used as a control. The presence of air puffs was found to significantly increase the likelihood of choosing voiceless responses for the two VOT continua but had no effect on choices for the vowel continuum. Analysis of response times revealed that the presence of air puffs lengthened responses for intermediate (ambiguous) stimuli and shortened them for endpoint (non-ambiguous) stimuli. The slowest response times were observed for the intermediate steps for all three continua, but for the bilabial continuum this effect interacted with the presence of air puffs: responses were slower in the presence of air puffs, and faster in their absence. This suggests that during integration auditory and aero-tactile inputs are weighted differently by the perceptual system, with the latter exerting greater influence in those cases where the auditory cues for voicing are ambiguous. (shrink)

This paper assesses the extent to which enhancing a penalty for hate crimes is a necessity. It conducts its analysis by looking at the theoretical justifications for and against such enhancement and also the impact of hate crimes on their victims, their groups and society, in comparison to non-bias crimes. It recognizes the particularly damaging effect of hate crimes on these three levels but argues that care must be taken to ensure a high threshold framework and a clear vision (...) in terms of protected characteristics. It argues that if penalty enhancements are to be any use, victims should be empowered to access the criminal justice system whilst the right to freedom of expression must be preserved. The paper commences with a definitional and conceptual framework of hate crimes, proceeds with the theoretical argumentations for and against hate crime legislation, conducts a legislative analysis of hate crimes, using examples from around the world as well as an assessment of the approach of the European Court of Human Rights to hate crime. (shrink)

Patients rely on, benefit from, and are strongly influenced by physicians’ recommendations. In spite of the centrality and importance of physicians’ recommendations to clinical care, there is only a scant literature describing the conceptual process of forming a clinical recommendation, and no discrete professional standards for making individual clinical recommendations. Evidence-based medicine and shared decision making together are intended to improve medical decision making, but there has been limited attention to how a recommendation is discretely formulated from either of those (...) processes or how patients’ preferences ought to be considered and how much weight they should hold. Moreover, physicians’ bias has been reported to strongly influence how a recommendation is derived, thereby undermining the quality of healthcare decisions and patients’ trust. To demonstrate a potential for improving the quality of decisions, this article proposes a conceptual framework for how physicians should reach a clinical recommendation and apply the process in practice. For preference-sensitive clinical decisions—that is, clinical decisions when patients’ values and preferences are relevant—the process for reaching a recommendation should be transparent to patients and should be based solely on the medical evidence and patients’ values and preferences. When patients’ preferences for care do not prioritize health, physicians decide whether their recommendation will prioritize a welfare-enhancing versus an autonomy-enhancing approach. When there are gaps in understanding how physicians derive their clinical recommendations and how to further improve the quality of the decisions, the author calls for further empiric research. (shrink)