Time pressure activates implicit racial bias while conscious awareness enables cognitive override

Evidence

The apparent discrepancies between police officers demonstrating bias in their response times, but not “shooting” decisions, as well as the lack of bias in experimental simulations but evidence of racial disparities in actual use of force can be reconciled when time and other situational factors are taken into account. Because stereotypes can operate implicitly and have automatic components (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), they tend to set up a prepotent response, which is akin to a dominant, knee-jerk reaction. These reflexive-like, category-based responses tend to manifest most strongly when time is limited (Pratto & Bargh, 1991; Stepanikova, 2012). This is analogous to being asked to blurt out the first word that comes to mind upon hearing “peanut butter.” Unsurprisingly, contingent upon culture and experience, the dominant response will be “jelly,” but with ample time people could come up with any number of responses. These quick reactions occur at the neural level. For example, when people are subliminally exposed to Black faces, compared to White faces, there is greater activation in the amygdala (Cunningham et al., 2004)—a part of the brain that registers fear and threat. The amount of amygdala activation is associated with the amount of implicit bias. But, present the faces for half a second, which is long enough for conscious awareness, and the heightened amygdala response disappears. People are consciously overriding the stereotypes: relative to White faces, Black faces caused more activity in the prefrontal cortex (Cunningham et al., 2004), which is associated with cognitive and behavior regulation. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 409

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the prepotent response and the amygdala vs. prefrontal cortex shift that operationalizes implicit bias override.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the noise/division-of-attention themes in deep-listening work: scarce processing time favors reflexive category responses over controlled ones.
• XREF: connects to: Awareness of prior influence marks the boundary separating implicit cognition from priming effects — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,…, 40; Redirecting attention to a biasing cue reduces or reverses the implicit effect it produces. — Anthony G. Greenwald and Mahzarin R. Banaji, Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes,…, 241