Implicit stereotype

An implicit bias, or implicit stereotype, is the unconscious attribution of particular qualities to a member of a certain social group. Measurement of this effect has been termed as pseudoscience by some peers.Few academic ideas have been as eagerly absorbed into public discourse lately as “implicit bias.” Embraced by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and most of the press, implicit bias has spawned a multimillion-dollar consulting industry, along with a movement to remove the concept of individual agency from the law. Yet its scientific basis is crumbling.Given the relatively small proportion of people who are overtly prejudiced and how clearly it is established that automatic race preference predicts discrimination, it is reasonable to conclude not only that implicit bias is a cause of Black disadvantage but also that it plausibly plays a greater role than does explicit bias. An implicit bias, or implicit stereotype, is the unconscious attribution of particular qualities to a member of a certain social group. Measurement of this effect has been termed as pseudoscience by some peers. Implicit stereotypes are shaped by experience and based on learned associations between particular qualities and social categories, including race and/or gender. Individuals' perceptions and behaviors can be influenced by the implicit stereotypes they hold, even if they are unaware/unintentionally hold such stereotypes. Implicit bias is an aspect of implicit social cognition: the phenomenon that perceptions, attitudes, and stereotypes operate without conscious intention. The existence of implicit bias is supported by a variety of scientific articles in psychological literature. Implicit stereotype was first defined by psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald in 1995. Explicit stereotypes, on the opposing end, are the result of conscious, intentional, and controllable thoughts and beliefs. Explicit biases are usually directed toward a group of people based on what is being perceived. An explicit stereotype regarding gender, for example, may be 'All adolescent males enjoy watching sports.' Implicit biases, on the other hand, are associations learned through past experiences. Implicit biases can be activated by the environment and operate outside of a person's intentional, conscious cognition. For example, a person can unconsciously form a bias towards all pitbulls as being dangerous animals. This bias may be associated with a single event that they have seen in the past, but the source of this association may be misidentified, or even unknown, by the individual who holds them. In other words, this implicit bias impacting behavior may manifest itself as a person declining an invitation to touch someone's pitbull (dog) on the street out of fear, but this person can't exactly understand why they are afraid and where their fear traces back to. Implicit bias can persist even when an individual rejects the bias explicitly. Our feelings and experiences can dictate how we look at the world. These can also become beneficial to us in the future because if we know what to avoid and how that made us feel, we can run or fight if we need to. Attitudes, stereotypes, prejudices, and bias are all things that can influence our behavior and feelings toward an individual or group. Bias is defined as prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair. Bias can be seen as the overarching definition of stereotype and prejudice, in that it is how we associate usually negative traits to a specific group of people. Our “implicit attitudes reflect constant exposure to stereotypical portrayals of members of, and items in, all kinds of different categories: racial groups, professions, women, nationalities, members of the LGBTQ community, moral and political values, etc.” An attitude is an evaluative judgment of an object, a person, or a social group. We can form an attitude toward soccer players. We can have many different types of attitudes toward soccer players that can either be positive or negative. A stereotype is the association of a person or a social group with a consistent set of traits. This may include both positive and negative traits, such as African Americans are great at sports or African Americans are more violent than any other race in the United States. There are many types of stereotypes that exists: racial, cultural, gender, group (i.e. college students), all being very explicit in the lives of many people.