Taking Apart the Idea of Unconscious Biases

Do we have biases that we cannot see… even if we look, really, really hard?

The Implicit Association Test has been used by social scientists widely to make the point that people are very often biased when – and in ways that – they do not know they are.

Personally, I’ve kind of held this as a truth. But it’s not just because they tell me so. I know from my own experiences growing up in New England and then going to school in California that people can have ways of thinking about race that are biased without knowing it. Specifically, living in California for a few years made me realize how…much more forward people in California, or at least the Bay Area, are in their thinking about race. So thus I realized how unenlightened my own thinking had been back when I lived in Massachusetts. After my own views on race changed, I realized how they had been.

The past few months in J-school I’ve been rather obsessed with the notion of being honest, at least to yourself, about your own biases. Perhaps it started with a lecture by one of the people who I would love to be, Shankar Vedantam, science reporter / behavior columnist for the Washington Post. In August he gave our full class a lecture about bias in which he went through a plethora of studies demonstrating that we are biased in ways that we don’t know, that is, people have unconscious biases.

I totally agreed with him. And while this was not new to me, I felt it was probably new to many of my classmates, so I was adamantly happy that they had brought this guy to lecture to us. Afterwards, I was so excited I thought about doing my master’s project on a related topic, and told him so when I went up to introduce myself and ask him a barrage of (what I thought were pretty good) questions.

(WHY was I so excited to hear his talk? It is a bit hard to think back to my mindset of the time, to be honest… I do think there were specific events in the past couple of years that have led me to feel so strongly about this topic. Maybe it is related to why I am such a strong supporter of bipartisan dialogue. Hmmm. Let me think about it some more.)

Then in my Reporting and Writing 1 class, several discussions have brought up the idea of what to do with your biases as a reporter.
1. As a journalist, we learned during a discussion one day in Reporting and Writing I, we are not supposed to publicly demonstrate any political favoritism, whether clearly for a political party or on any issue that is controversial. (The line on what is considered a political/controversial issue gets murky, when you wonder, hmmm, can you donate to a nature group, can you go to an anti-sweatshop rally. But the rule is there and is rigorous.) You definitely cannot take sides on any issue that you are covering. But for most journalists, and their news organizations, it is much more serious, and deeper than that. Many news organizations will prohibit its employees from giving campaign contributions. My professor, who is more ethical on many issues than the average journalist, says that her husband is an Obama supporter and put an Obama bumper sticker on their car. But she as a journalist could not be driving around with that. So they got a magnetic Obama bumper sticker that she could take off the care when she drove, and he could put back on when he drove. Leonard Downey, former executive editor of the Washington Post, said the only political activities that journalists can participate in is vote. I have read that some journalists don’t even do that: They forsake their rights as a citizen for their calling as a journalist.

I was fortunate enough to see this ethic in

What is the reason for this almost superhuman ethic that we must follow?

Our adjunct professor talked a bunch about how it helps up maintain our credibility and protects us against attacks of being biased.

But our main professor said (when I asked) that it was more than that. There is something about publicly withholding your opinions that actually makes you (have to) be more truly open-minded to the other side, she said.

I have strongly embraced this code of journalistic conduct and prided myself on it. (Ok, now thinking about it, I do actually think this is strongly related to why I am a big fan of bipartisan dialogue. I’ll similarly pride myself on my support for and understanding of the importance of bipartisan dialogue, that I am genuinely interested in how Republicans think and am not super-partisan (ok, this sentence shows that I am obviously partisan at base, but I have been proud to come to the realization that I am not absolutely right in my partisan views, that they come from my background, where I’ve lived, the crowds I’ve been in; that I am genuinely interested in hearing and understanding the “other side”)).

So I’ve had kind of an attitude of superiority, at least in my head, towards all this.

2. A classmate turned up a story around October about a Harlem guy who combined dealing marijuana with advocating support for Obama. We went through a whole class discussion about a dilemma she had (unrelated to bias; it had to do with protecting your sources, how what we do can harm them, etc., and whatnot). But another thing that came up was how part of why she felt uncomfortable about publishing the story was because he’s an Obama supporter – though not affiliated with his official campaign – and she, too, supports Obama.

At this point, another classmate seemed to have some sort of ephiphany. She said she realized that if she were faced with such a story, she would jump on it if it were a McCain supporter, whereas she would really not be able to write the story if it was an Obama guy like this guy. This seemed to be the first time that this realization about herself and how her biases would come into play, occurred to her.

And there I was sitting on my high horse (I guess I can call it that even though this is really not a prevalent/important “moral” value anywhere except in my own head; and I guess in journalism), lauding myself for my long-time understanding of the principle that people are all biased and that our unconscious biases will inevitably affect our work.

I had been in other class discussions before where I got really annoyed when one girl gave a really canned response about how “the New York Times isn’t liberal; only it’s editorial page is liberal, but not its news section” – in response to my statement that the New York Times is liberal – as part of a Critical Issues in Journalism discussion about what news media lean politically which way. At that point I felt it was so obvious that the reason people did not see the New York Times as liberal was because they are liberals. (Whereas conservative people I’ve interacted with clearly think the NYT is liberal.)

But this day in RW1, a third classmate made a statement akin to “everybody always thinks they can keep their biases out of their writing, but this is a perfect example of how it does affect our work.” I thought, yes! People in my Critical Issues class always seemed to talk about how we can just keep our biases out of our work – to which I think in response, that’s BS, they will infiltrate your work even if you don’t do it consciously. So what this third RW1 classmate said was, to me, exactly what I believed, and I am so glad he could acknowledge it to all of us.

This is all just to say that I have been super keen on the notion that (1) people have unconscious biases, and (2) as journalists, they will affect us in our work, and the best way to start to getting past our biases is, first, to acknowledge that we have them.

3. A guest lecturer spoke to use about race. (I think she’s a TV/documentary professor or something at the J-school.) She was black, and she has been our only black guest lecturer, and, interestingly enough, perhaps the only one who was not a New York Times staff writer (we have had like 10).

In that discussion, a couple of comments were thrown around between her and one or two other students about how “everybody’s racist,” and that one student agreed at least. But we didn’t quite get INTO it. On the other side of the room, how this all came up was, another student was talking about how bad he would feel writing about somebody being racist, even if the person had admitted it themselves. I asked him what was different about writing that than from writing about anything else that was bad about a person. A second classmate chimed in and said, there’s this feeling in America that being racist is unforgivable. He’s the one who agreed when the lecturer made the aside comment that everybody’s racist. I thought, hmmm, that’s interesting. Perhaps I have been so conscious of my own unconscious biases for so long that it no longer strikes me as “bad” have such biases; and I am totally out of touch with how most people think, and completely within my own head.

Can we think we’re more biased than we actually are?

Is there harm to thinking of oneself as biased?
Would it make you more biased?
Is it ok if you are right, but harmful if you think you’re more biased than you

Can there be value to ignoring – and even suppressing – your own biases after all?

actually are?