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Different Conceptions of Bias

Katherine Puddifoot has recently edited a special issue of Philosophical Psychology on bias. In this post, she introduces some of the conceptions of bias and discrimination discussed by the contributors. In next week's post Katherine will summarise the authors' ideas about how to mitigate bias.


Katherine Puddifoot

Ema Sullivan-Bissett provides a defence of her view that implicit biases are unconscious imaginings, by drawing on studies of the impact of the use of virtual reality on people’s biases. Sullivan-Bissett argues that implicit biases are not necessarily propositional, but may instead be characterized by being imagistic, explaining how sometimes, but not always, immersion in an imagistic virtual reality is effective in shifting bias.


Felipe de Carvalho and Joel Krueger adopt a conception of implicit bias as embodied perceptual habits. They argue that conceived in this way implicit bias can explain certain injustices experienced by children with Down syndrome and autism. Children experience maladaptive development niches due to the embodied perceptual habits of those around them, including their caregivers. 

Ella Whiteley focuses instead on a form of discrimination that happens via attention, “wherein certain social groups have the ‘wrong’ property (such as their skin color) attended to relatively better than the ‘right’ property (such as their accomplishments)”. Whiteley focuses on the importance of drawing on testimony from lived experience to understand this distinctive form of unintentional discrimination.

William Fraker discusses generics like “women are emotional”, proposing that they are dichotomizing perspectives, leading people to be viewed in terms of their distinction from others. Generics, on this view, can lead to unintentional discrimination by shaping behaviours and social expectations, and providing support for explanations and defences of these behaviours and expectations. 

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen, Søren Serritzlew, Lasse Laustsen, Simone Sommer Degn and Andreas Albertsen are interested in how to conceptualize discrimination in general. In their experimental study, they probe whether discrimination tends to be conceived in a comparative and/or reflexive way. People are less likely to perceive discrimination where there is someone else similarly qualified who is treated differently from those who may have been discriminated against. However, as hypothesized, whether the social identity of the person who is treated differently is the same as that of the target person seems to matter.


Gabbrielle Johnson


Gabbrielle M Johnson focuses on ways that social bias can manifest in perception and cognition. Johnson argues that social biases should be defined as a response to the underdetermination of data. They take as an input particular instances of a social kind and produce a stereotypical property attribution. Social kind bias include perceptual biases and essentialising cognitive biases, which should be evaluated on different bases.

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