In this post, I interview Imperfect Cognitions network member Jules Holroyd, Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow
in the department of philosophy at the University of Sheffield, and Principal
Investigator of the Leverhulme Trust funded Bias and Blame project.
The project runs from 2014-2017 and the team includes senior lecturer Tom
Stafford and postdoctoral researcher Robin Scaife in the department of
psychology, and PhD student Andreas Bunge in the department of philosophy.
SS: The Bias and Blame
project investigates the relationship between moral interactions, such as
blame, and the manifestation of implicit bias. How did you become interested in
this topic, and has there been much previous research in this area?
JH: The project looks principally at whether moral
interactions, such as blaming, impact on the expression of implicit racial
bias. The interest in this question
arose out of the philosophical debates about responsibility for bias, in which
two claims seemed to be prominent: first, that individuals are not responsible
for implicit bias (for having it, or for manifesting it). I disagreed with this
claim, and have argued in various places (here, here and here) that it is not
at all obvious that any general exculpating conditions hold in relation to our
discriminatory behaviour that results from implicit bias.
Second, authors have claimed that irrespective of
individuals’ responsibility, we should not blame individuals, since that would
be counterproductive. It might provoke hostility and backlash, and make people
less motivated to buy in to the project of tackling discrimination and
attendant problems of under-representation. This sort of claim is found in some
of Jenny Saul’s early work on implicit bias, and more recently in Manuel
Vargas’s work (on his revisionist conception of responsibility in relation to
implicit bias). I can see the appeal of this kind of claim, and the reasons for
caution with our use of blame. But ultimately the impact of blame on implicit
attitudes and individual motivation (explicit and implicit) is an empirical
question. There hadn’t been a great deal of empirical research into this issue:
some studies looked at the role of moral confrontations in combating the
expression of bias (Czopp and Monteith, 2006). Others had examined the role of inducing
guilt in blocking its expression (Moskowitz & Li 2011). These findings
seemed to indicate that under certain conditions, moral interactions and the
provoking of moral emotions could have positive effects on bias mitigation: not
the sort of backlash that had been worried about.
Moreover, this kind of intervention – harnessing the
resources of our moral interactions with each other – seemed promising in
comparison with some of the more individualistic and mechanistic attempts to
alter individual cognition (which have been notoriously difficult to replicate
and sustain). But no one had yet looked at how blame might impact on implicit
biases and their expression. It looked like the sort of question that we could construct
an experimental design to test. And this is what we were able to do, with the
funds from the Leverhulme Project Research Grant.
SS: One might assume
that progress in empirical work on implicit bias is mostly within the purview
of psychology, but your research utilises concepts from philosophical study to both
inform empirical investigations and to interpret the results. This is obviously
something that we’re interested in at PERFECT. In your opinion, what is the
value of interdisciplinary work on implicit bias, and co-operation between
philosophers and psychologists more generally?
JH: The interdisciplinary nature of our research has been
crucial. What we are exploring is essentially an empirical question that arises
out of philosophical debate. But the notions deployed in the experimental
design – holding morally responsible, expressing blame – are concepts that have
been philosophically honed, and it was important that their role in the
experimental process adequately reflected the notions that philosophers have
been working with (and worrying about).
At the same time, input was needed from the experimentalists
on the project (Tom and Robin), since the framing of those notions in the
experiment needed to be empirically operational: there is no point deploying
concepts that are philosophically rigorous, but opaque or alien to the
participants in the studies (who were not philosophers). Later in the process,
when we had the data set from the studies, interpreting them and anticipating
their significance for a range of philosophical debates, required both statistical
analysis and conceptual work, so again, having philosophers and psychologists
around the table was invaluable at that stage too.
We are fortunate in that over time, we’ve had various
interactions (reading groups, feedback on each other’s work) that enabled us to
come to common understandings of terminology and the angles we each approach
things from. And we get on really well, so even where there are disagreements
they are never (not to date, at least!) irresolvable!
The whole process, from conception of the research question,
to experimental design, to interpretation of the findings, has been rigorously
interdisciplinary. This has enabled us to do research that we simply could not
have done otherwise! And, we’ve reached some preliminary conclusions that, we
hope, make a valuable contribution to the philosophical debates…