Mind science bias interventions only work where actors already share egalitarian values

Evidence

For the insights from the cognitive sciences to be useful in identifying behavior and policies that are contributing to racialand ethnicity-based inequities in the CJS, a granular examination of systems is required. We are engaged in work with stakeholders in the CJS in several cities with the goal of subjecting this hypothesis to empirical study. … In workshops themselves, we begin with a caveat about the behaviors the mind sciences are not designed to address: overt racism and corruption. The mind science interventions only have the potential to be valuable in contexts in which actors are in good faith. Our work is designed for contexts when the district attorney and a significant majority of the assistant district attorneys (ADAs) and others in the office generally share egalitarian values and seek to adhere to the rule of law, but find that their outcomes show disproportionate incarceration of people who are Black, Native American, or Latino. Our goal is for them to assess whether their charging decisions, plea offers, and other decisions may be affected by bias and to determine what steps they can take to align their practices with their values. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 1377

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bears on the reader’s core question about the gap between professed conviction and measured bias: here bias reduction is framed as possible only when convictions are genuine.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: implicit-bias training belongs only where egalitarian values are already professed — its domain is conviction-behavior alignment, not rooting out true racists.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 1377