Katherine Puddifoot has recently edited a special issue of Philosophical Psychology on bias. In last week's post Katherine considered new ways of conceptualising bias. In this post, Katherine introduces some of the methods for understanding and mitigating bias discussed by the contributors.
James Chamberlain, Jules Holroyd, Ben Jenkins and Robin Scaife examine empirical work that they argue fails to distinguish intersectional bias from non-binary categories, does not reflect the heterogeneity of bias, and assumes that when people harbor intersectional biases (e.g., the intersectional implicit bias associating traits with Black Women), these will be a complex compound of simple concepts associated with both of the intersecting identities (e.g., White women and Black men).
For Chamberlain and colleagues, it is crucial to do justice to the varying different experiences that members of a social group may have, and how these may change qualitatively based on their membership of multiple intersecting oppressions. Achieving this goal effectively will involve gathering qualitative data on lived experience of oppression.
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| Jules Holroyd |
Anna Drozdzowicz and Yeled Peled note various conceptual and methodological problems in the study of this implicit linguistic discrimination: for instance, the ways that implicit and explicit discrimination can cross-cut and the intersectionality of implicit linguistic bias with other forms of bias.
The authors articulate the worry that research on the topic may be stalled because of the ambiguities and complexities raised by these issues. Then they propose that testimony of lived experience of being the target of implicit linguistic discrimination may reveal the nature of the phenomenon, e.g., how the communicative norms of a society or culture undermine the contributions of interlocutors with certain accents.
(The special issue feature another paper on strategies to overcome linguistic bias, by Finocchiaro and Perrine. The authors have blogged on their paper here.)
Ella Whiteley describes the methodology used when developing her account of harmful salience perspectives. This involved drawing from testimony of lived experience of having certain aspects of one’s identity made salient when others should be. Whiteley argues that people with lived experience of discrimination have a felt experience of moral rupture that points toward something being wrong.
This moral rupture leads them to adopt a critical thought process toward society, social discourse and the mechanisms that render their experiences invisible. They become trained observers, who are well positioned not only to provide informative testimony but also to evaluate other people’s testimony and its value as a source of information about discrimination.
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| Mahzarin Banaji |
Joseph A Vitriol, Mahzarin R Banaji and Robert Lowe conducted a study within a US police force, studying attitudes toward diversity training among members of the force before and after they attended an implicit bias training session run by the world leading researcher on implicit bias, Mahzarin Banaji.
The study found a dramatic opinion change, suggesting that diversity training, which is often viewed with suspicion, can be perceived as consistent with duty and responsibility to the community, if it is grounded in credible sources and viewed as non-threatening. The study demonstrated that people’s attitudes toward the types of diversity training that may shift implicit bias can be improved.