A Plea for Anti-Anti-Individualism: How Oversimple Psychology Misleads Social Policy

Are individuals morally responsible for their implicit biases? One reason to think not is that implicit biases are often advertised as unconscious, 'introspectively inaccessible' attitudes. However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, although often in partial and inarticulate ways. Here I explore the implications of this evidence of partial awareness for individuals' moral responsibility. First, I argue that responsibility comes in degrees. Second, I argue that individuals' partial awareness of their implicit biases makes them (partially) morally responsible for them. I argue by analogy to a close relative of implicit bias: moods.

Research suggests that interventions involving extensive training or counterconditioning can reduce implicit prejudice and stereotyping, and even susceptibility to stereotype threat. This research is widely cited as providing an "existence proof" that certain entrenched social attitudes are capable of change, but is summarily dismissed-by philosophers, psychologists, and activists alike-as lacking direct, practical import for the broader struggle against prejudice, discrimination, and inequality. Criticisms of these debiasing procedures fall into three categories: concerns about empirical efficacy, about practical feasibility, and about the failure to appreciate the underlying structural-institutional nature of discrimination. I reply to these criticisms of debiasing, and argue that a comprehensive strategy for combating prejudice and discrimination should include a central role for training our biases away. IntroductionMore than a decade of research suggests that implicit biases can be transformed (or at least considerably weakened) by interventions that involve extensive training or counterconditioning. In particular, Kerry Kawakami and colleagues have demonstrated the benefits of: counterstereotype training, which involves repeatedly affirming counterstereotypes, for example, by responding "yes" to an image of a black person paired with the word "friendly," or by repeatedly pairing images of women with words like "powerful" and "courageous;" and In addition to reducing bias on a variety of indirect measures, including the Implicit Association Test (IAT), these training procedures:• reorient unreflective social behaviors, for example, by leading white and Asian participants to instinctively sit closer to a black interlocutor; • make stereotypes less likely to come to mind and color judgment, for example, by reducing the likelihood that participants recommend hiring a man over an equally qualified woman; and • reduce susceptibility to stereotype threat, for example, by improving women's performance on math tests even though they have just been reminded of pervasive stereotypes about gender and mathematical aptitude, and would otherwise feel anxiety and underperform.While this research is often cited as providing a sort of "existence proof" that certain entrenched social attitudes are capable of change, it is summarily dismissed by social scientists, philosophers, and activists as lacking direct, practical import for the broader struggle against prejudice and discrimination. For example, David Schneider's 568-page opus on social cognition, The Psychology of Stereotyping, devotes only a single paragraph to this research on "retraining," concluding that, "Obviously, in everyday life people are not likely to get such deliberate training" (2004, 423). I find the widespread dismissal of these training procedures puzzling. Implicit biases influence whom we trust and whom we ignore, whom we promote and for whom we vote. They affect interactions between teachers and students, doctors and patients, police and civilians, ...

In contrast to individualistic explanations of social injustice that appeal to implicit attitudes, structural explanations are unintuitive: they appeal to entities that lack clear ontological status, and the explanatory mechanism is similarly unclear. This makes structural explanations unappealing. The present work proposes a structural explanation of one type of injustice that happens in conversations, discursive injustice. This proposal meets two goals. First, it satisfactorily accounts for the specific features of this particular kind of injustice; and second, it articulates a structural explanation that overcomes their unattractiveness. The main idea is that discursive injustice is not the result of biased interlocutors, but of problematic discursive norms.