As the country takes stock of the growing number of stories of people of color dying at the hands of police officers, more and more we are hearing about the role of implicit bias. Implicit bias trainings are being implemented at police districts across the nation—but what is implicit bias, and how do we tackle it? In this episode, Goldman School Professor Jack Glaser and MPA alumna Jasmine Jones talk about the brain’s role in implicit bias, the difference between implicit bias and prejudice, and the limits of trying to break the patterns of implicit bias without changing the societal landscape.  

Listen to Jack and Jasmine unpack the research about whether public policies can provide a solution for overcoming implicit bias in policing.  

Speakers featured on this epsiode

Jack Glaser is Professor and Associate Dean of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy. He is a social psychologist whose primary research interest is in stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. He studies these intergroup biases at multiple levels of analysis. For example, he investigates the unconscious operation of stereotypes and prejudice using computerized reaction time methods, and is investigating the implications of such subtle forms of bias in law enforcement. In particular, he is interested in racial profiling, especially as it relates to the psychology of stereotyping, and the self-fulfilling effects of such stereotype-based discrimination.

Additionally, Professor Glaser has conducted research on a very extreme manifestation of intergroup bias - hate crime - and has carried out analyses of historical data as well as racist rhetoric on the Internet to challenge assumptions about economic predictors of intergroup violence. Another area of interest is in electoral politics and political ideology, specifically the role of emotion (as experienced and expressed) in politics. Professor Glaser is working with the Center for Policing Equity as one of the principal investigators on a National Science Foundation- and Google-funded project to build a National Justice Database of police stops and use of force incidents. He is the author of Suspect Race: Causes & Consequences of Racial Profiling.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Reem Rayef Welcome to season two of Talk Policy to Me. My name is Reem Rayef and I'm a first year Masters of Public Policy student at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy. Today we have a chance to hear Jasmine Jones, an alumni of the Goldman Master of Public Affairs program, interview Professor Jack Glaser, an expert on stereotypes and implicit bias, especially in policing. This conversation took place last spring, but this week as the nation grapples with the death of Botham Shem Jean, who was shot in his own apartment by an off duty Dallas police officer. We wanted to share Professor Jack Glaser's thoughts with you. Here's Jasmine Jones in conversation with Professor Jack Glaser.

[00:00:51] Jasmine Jones Welcome Jack. Thanks for joining us.

[00:00:54] Jack Glaser Thank you Jasmine.

[00:00:55] Jasmine Jones So we're going to get into the meat of implicit bias and the impact it has on policing a little bit shortly. But I want you to tell us a little bit more about yourself and what inspired you to get into this kind of work.

[00:01:06] Jack Glaser At the risk of sounding a little too Freudian it goes back to my childhood. My my parents had a real influence on me in this respect. My mother was a Holocaust survivor and she ended up in San Francisco actually at age 12 in 1940. But her parents didn't make it out. They were exterminated at Auschwitz. And so my childhood was really saturated with the notion that prejudice exists and that it can have a profound impact on your life. I never knew my grandparents and my mother was traumatized by those events. My father had a really different but also influential background which is that he was a World War Two combat veteran born in the U.S. and then went on to find religion and become a rabbi but actually dedicated most of his career to civil rights advocacy for all kinds of groups including Native Americans and farmworkers and African-Americans and eventually Tibetans. So from him I got the sense of the importance of working for justice for groups that have less advantage than my own. And you know the combination of those two things actually made me want to be a civil rights lawyer which obviously didn't pan out. But I get to work with civil rights lawyers now which is very gratifying. I should add that then things really took a turn when I discovered social psychology and realized that there was this very rigorous scientific set of paradigms for examining prejudice and figuring it out how it works at the level of the individual mind and how it can lead to discrimination. I got very passionate about that and pursued my doctoral degree in that area and became a real bench scientist and was doing very basic research on prejudice which again took a turn toward public policy as I was moving from graduate school toward my position as a public policy professor.

[00:03:22] Jasmine Jones Got it. So you have really done a lot around this work with prejudice and you've done some work as it relates to implicit bias. Can you tell us a little bit more about maybe the differences or similarities between prejudice and implicit bias.

[00:03:38] Jack Glaser Yeah I would say for the most part the big distinction is that implicit bias is a subset of prejudice. Prejudice is the larger category of of generally negative attitudes that people have toward members of other groups although it can be focused toward one's own group as well. But it's a group based bias that can have cognitive or affective components and can lead to discrimination. Implicit bias or implicit prejudice or implicit stereotyping is a subset of that that operates outside of conscious awareness and control. And I would actually argue that it's the largest subset of that. I think most of our mental life occurs outside of conscious awareness and control and that that applies to our mental life with regard to how we think about other people in the groups they belong to.

[00:04:27] Jasmine Jones That sounds pretty big given that you say that most of the things that we do happens in our unconscious mind and so if we have thoughts about people and we're acting on them and unconsciously that can have a pretty profound role in connections or interactions between groups and communities. Police in the community.

[00:04:49]  Implicit bias is a buzz word right now everybody's talking about implicit bias. Can you tell us a little bit about what it is and what it is not.

[00:04:57] Jack Glaser It's important to highlight that it's a buzz word and that is useful in some ways and problematic in others and I'll try to touch on that. Implicit bias is built on decades of cognitive psychological science on implicit memory so the general notion is that because we have these sophisticated brains but we are we have five senses that have to sort through all of the information that's coming through them at us at a steady stream, our brains have to be able to process most of that information without having to have a subjective conscious experience of it. So we process a lot of information and it goes straight into our implicit memory or it might go through our explicit conscious experience and then get stored implicitly. And that's adaptive in order for us to be able to identify objects and people and concepts rapidly and to respond to them appropriately. We have to be able to do that very automatically. And so for example when you when you see a friend coming you don't have to wrack your memory to think what's my friend's name it just pops into your consciousness.

[00:06:07] Jasmine Jones Sometimes I rack my memory.

[00:06:09] Jack Glaser Well but if it's a good friend you probably don't have to. So that's part of the formula for implicit memory is that these are well rehearsed repeated exposure kinds of things that get that get well established in our network of associations and our memories. So that's true for things in general and it's true for how we process information about other people and the groups that they belong to. The other part of this is that we have a strong tendency to categorize things we don't just see each thing or each person as an individual unique idiosyncratic instance, we try to put them into buckets or categories in our memories so that we can make predictions about what they're going to be like. And again that happens very spontaneously very automatically and and largely outside of our conscious awareness and control. So this confluence of categorization and implicit memory given that we're social beings and that we have to relate to other people as well and make predictions about other people and what they're going to do what they're going to be like or make inferences about why they're doing what they're doing. The categorization and the implicit associations come together to cause prejudice and stereotyping outside of conscious awareness and control.

[00:07:22] Jasmine Jones So let me try to give you an example of something and tell me if I'm on track with how I'm understanding this. If a group of people, say a white person, is not exposed to black people, they don't have connections with them, they're not in their community like that. And the only images and stories they see or hear are negative things whether it be on television, the news, things they hear in their community, and then they engage with a black person later and they have a negative interaction. Is that something that comes out of all of these stored memories of what it is, of what a black person is supposed to be?

[00:08:02] Jack Glaser Yeah that's accurate I would I would only qualify it to say that it doesn't have to be all of the exposure being negative it could just be a preponderance of the exposure being negative and in fact another underlying root cause of intergroup bias or prejudice is the tendency that we have to just prefer people who are like us, people who we perceive as belonging to our group and that can be under the most minimal conditions. So different features, you know the appearance of a different racial group that immediately causes us to have a preference for the people who we perceive as being from our own group. Layer on top of that the specific information that we might get that is going to be inherently biased because there are other psychological processes that tend to cause us to look for positive information about people like us and negative information about people who are unlike us. There are all of these things and then there are the historical effects like the history of slavery in America that will cause one group to be particularly stigmatized and the content of our information that we get about them to be relatively negative. And that will in fact yes cause us to judge an individual person from that group in a manner that's consistent with our prior conceptions about that group.

[00:09:18] Jasmine Jones Thank you for clearing that up for me and helping me understand that some more in helping our listeners understand that because I think that's really important. From your research and the projects that you've done, do you believe implicit bias shapes inequality? So all these things that we talked about how we understand other humans that we may or may not engage with, do you think that shapes inequality. And what are all the factors that should be considered, and how can policy mitigate those outcomes?

[00:09:47] Jasmine Jones So one thing before I do that I want to I want to explain what I think is another important piece of the psychological puzzle of how implicit and explicit biases, but primarily implicit biases lead to biased judgments and behaviors or what we would call discrimination. And that is through a process that we call disambiguation. And this is important because the old school conception of how prejudice leads to discrimination required a degree of intentionality sort of a notion that people were doing it on purpose and and that's relevant still in the law because most of our anti-discrimination law requires a demonstration of an intent to discriminate in order for there to be some kind of legal recourse. There are some exceptions but they're very difficult to to achieve. So what the psychological research has shown is that what's more generally happening is that people are confronted with another person you know they encounter another person, that person is ambiguous to them because we can't read another person's mind, we are just making inferences about what they're thinking and what they're likely to do to us or to our environment. And so we are trying to make those inferences and all we have to go on is what we know about other people. And so what happens is the implicit stereotypes that we have of what people from that that group are like will color our perception when we're trying to figure out what those ambiguous behaviors and signals mean. And so it's a more subtle process than people realize. And that's why people who have very conscious egalitarian intentions who don't think of themselves as biased in any way and who would never want to discriminate are still vulnerable to discriminating because the process to them feels very fair and normal. It's you know that person is doing this, I think that's because they have this motivation, they have this attitude, they have this orientation, and it feels like they're judging their behavior objectively. But in fact their judgments are being skewed by their preconceptions. So given that that's the way that this tends to operate, and that's not to say that there aren't people who are explicitly prejudiced, we saw them marching in Charlottesville this year. I wouldn't say their numbers are strong but they exist and their voices can be quite loud and they're louder these days for one reason or another which we can talk about later. But in terms of how implicit bias leads to inequity and inequality I think it's important as your question hinted that we put it in the context of other things that can lead to inequality and I think it's important to acknowledge that while implicit bias is very well validated scientifically and it is a buzzword these days and that's great that it's getting attention. I think it's probably the case that most of the inequality that we see today, racial, gender, et cetera, is due to structural barriers. It's due to historical inequalities that are that are perpetuated structurally.

[00:12:58] Jasmine Jones I was going to ask you, can implicit bias go anywhere? People often talk about how we have to get rid of these things. How do we get rid of folks implicit bias?

[00:13:06] Jack Glaser Well we can talk about that for sure and I'm happy to talk about that and there's good research on that. But before we even talk about that, my point would be that even if you could wipe somebodies mind clean of their implicit biases they're going to go right back into the environment they were in before that they learned them in and they'll be renewed fairly quickly.

[00:13:28] Jasmine Jones So you have a wealth of knowledge of implicit bias and prejudice and how it informs our interactions with folks both from like a law enforcement interacting with the community but also us individually interacting with each other. Can you tell us a little bit about how you think understanding these implicit biases can change policy but more particularly on policing strategies?

[00:13:59] Jack Glaser Yeah that's a really important question because right now the application of implicit bias to policing is predominantly around providing training on implicit bias and I'm sorry to have to say that the evidence so far indicates that none of that training works. There's an absence of evidence that it works and there's some evidence of an absence of it working. And so we don't have reason for a lot of confidence that providing these trainings is actually going to change police officer behavior. So my view is that the education on implicit bias needs to be targeted at the management level both in policing and in other other environments.

[00:14:41] Jasmine Jones I really think that's very important in terms of how you shift the culture of an environment that has been operating in this manner for so long and it sounds like you really have to do it from a management level for them to understand the problems with this way of thinking or just the way we incentivize and the strategies and how we shift that to be more equitable for our communities. On the flip side I see you have the trainings but you know recently in California, trying to be the golden state, introduced the bill to possibly restrict lethal force of officers. Do you think that's the route to go in terms of policy and legislation? Training is isn't enough. Is this a good thing to do?

[00:15:28]  I haven't read the legislation and I have sort of just a caricature of what I think it's trying to do. I'll say generally on principle I think it's it's time that state and maybe even federal legislature weighs in on use of force policy. And that's given my understanding that law enforcement in the United States is utterly decentralized. There are 16 to 18 thousaand law enforcement agencies in the United States and they are not governed by any single central authority. The Department of Justice has no command and control authority over local policing or state policing. States have some control over state level policing but most policing is local. And so we have all of these autonomous units out there and they are using some industry wide standards and there are some organizations like Peace Officers Standards and Trainings (POST) that provide guidance on what policies should be but they're each pretty much up to their own devices to determine what their policies and practices are going to be. And that's inevitably going to vary considerably. So you'll see remarkable variation in use of force policies from one department to another, both in terms of you know what's allowed and what needs to be reported, but also in terms of the training that's that's offered really wide ranging variation in terms of the kinds of training that are given for things that we now know work like de-escalation that can reduce the likelihood of use of force occurring and certainly of excessive use of force occurring. So there is an opportunity there and the vacuum has not been sufficiently filled by policing professional organizations. There have been some good efforts in that regard and there was a task force on 21st Century Policing that came out of the Obama administration and I think that has promoted some progress but there's still wide variability and not sufficient accountability. And I think police departments need help in standardizing that. The trick will be for the legislation to be reasonable and implementable and politically feasible.

[00:17:45] Jasmine Jones People, communities, advocates, students, the world is seeing kind of like this heightened sense of black and brown bodies being killed by the hands of law enforcement. I think people are tired they're scared. They don't know what to do. People want things to happen right now. But this kind of work takes time. What words of encouragement and hope do you give to advocates community members folks who are in the trenches trying to change this kind of work and make sure you know Stephon Clark and Trayvon Martin's don't have to happen so often or at all for that matter.

[00:18:26] Jack Glaser Well as a policy scholar I'm duty bound to say that bad things are going to happen. So we'll never get down to zero for any bad outcome unfortunately. But I do think it could be reduced considerably. Let let me just start with the point of hope because I think there actually is reason for considerable hope, which is that as bad as things seem right now they're not actually any worse than they've been. What's really changed in recent years is the public consciousness of the problem. And that's probably largely due to technology and the fact that we're all walking around with you know high resolution video cameras all the time now and police officers are wearing body worn cameras. And you know the Stephon Clark incident which, I don't necessarily recommend people watch the video because it's it's pretty painful to watch, but it's kind of a microcosm of all that. You've got the helicopter view you've got the officer view. And then in some instances you'll have those things and bystander video views or in the Castillo case you have you know his girlfriend in the car live streaming to Facebook. So you've got all kinds of opportunities and as painful as these things are to watch, the public consciousness has inevitably been raised considerably because you can't turn away from it you can't deny that it's happening and what black and brown communities have been saying for decades is now finally being accepted by the larger population. And that doesn't mean that that's going to inherently solve the problem. But it does bring attention to it and I think that Movements like Black Lives Matter are gaining traction in terms of real policy traction. So we see in California AB 953, the Racial Identity Profiling Act. You know that that I think was motivated in in part by the increasing public awareness around disparate policing including use of force. Then you see the Washington Post and The Guardian in the U.K. tracking fatal officer involved shootings. So we now have better data on that in a fairly accessible format. And so so there is improvement on the data front. But there needs to be a lot more work done on data front because just like with other policies use of force policies. Data collection and reporting is also decentralized in policing so that's all over the map as well. California is trying to standardize that with AB 953 and the National Justice database that I'm working on is trying to achieve that at a national level.

[00:21:06] Jasmine Jones Well thank you so much Jack for your time. You brought so much information and knowledge around implicit bias, prejudice, how those things kind of inform inequality in and how we can change. What what to look forward to, what communities can do. So again thank you for your time. We really appreciate you being here.

[00:21:26] Jack Glaser Thank you Jasmine.

[00:21:28] Jasmine Jones Talk policy to me is a production of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for the Future of Young Americans. For show notes, visit us at talkpolicytome.org. Music heard on today's episode is by Pat Mesiti-Miller. Talk Policy to Me's executive producers are Bora Lee Reed and Sarah Swanbeck. I'm Reem Rayef. See you next time.