A being of two minds, or why we must get in touch with our inner bigots.

Implicit bias is a phenomenon which is problematic in terms of what it means to be rational self-aware beings, and also with how we look at ourselves as individuals. It is relatively trivial to spot the biases of others, that your mother always decides to walk another block if the taxi driver looks a little too black, or your uncle who keeps conflating paedophiles with homosexuals, or your best mate who always dates the same kind of manic pixie dream girl. They are harder creatures to notice within oneself, very few of us will have the experience of thinking “I viscerally hate Serbs”, or whatever the out-group might be. Very few people are cartoonishly evil for evil’s own sake. Even those who have objectively objectionable opinions will frame them in the context of religion, tradition or some other form of cultural acceptance. Most people, I believe, believe themselves to be right thinking, and that is a problem.

There is a great risk for those who see themselves to be right thinking. As Schwitzgebel (2010) correctly notes that “[o]nce we have our judgements right, we have our beliefs right, and thus we have right that aspect of the mind which the philosophical community cares [about]”. The risk with coming to believe that we believe the correct thing is that having come to this belief,  it can seem as though that is sufficient for us to behave correctly in all the ways that are seemingly important. This risk also extends to people more generally and far beyond the philosophical community that Schwitzgebel is concerned about.

Schwitzgebel’s Discussion on Implicit Biases

In “Acting contrary to our professed beliefs” Schwitzgebel considers the penumbra of belief, isolating three cases of agents acting counter to their consciously held beliefs. Ultimately Schwitzgebel argues that beliefs which “reflect our values, our commitments, our enduing ways of viewing the world… change slowly, painfully, effortfully… it takes work to bring one’s overall dispositional structure in line with one’s broad, life involving judgements”, which is a position that is intuitively correct, but I believe that it is also unfortunately useless for resolving the problem that Schwitzgebel highlights so successfully.

The three cases that Schwitzgebel uses in his discussion are those of Ben the forgetful driver, Kaipeng the trembling Stoic, and Juliet the implicit racist. Ben is someone who has information that he knows to be correct – that a bridge is closed – but frequently forgets that he has that information, and acts as though he does not have that information, unless it is absolutely salient i.e. he is at the bridge and then remembers that he knows that it is closed, and that he should have taken the long way round. Kaipeng is an intellectual Stoic who believes that he believes in the principles of Stoicism but still fears death, importantly Kaipeng knows that his actions run counter to his consciously held beliefs and “seek[s] to change them”. Then we have, for the purpose of this paper, the more interesting case of Juliet the implicit racist: Juliet is verbally – and cognitively – egalitarian but if someone who did not share a common tongue with her were to examine her actions they would believe Juliet to be a racist, for Juliet this is arational behaviour. Futhermore, Juliet would not realise that she appears to be a racist, were we to only consider her behaviour.

It seems apparent from Schwitzgebel’s description of Juliet that on a cognitive level she clearly isn’t a racist but at a level which is not immediately apparent to her, she behaves as though she is a racist.

Cognitive and Arational Behaviour

For the purpose of this discussion I’ll use the term “cognitive” to refer to those internally voiced thoughts that we are phenomenally conscious of when we are actively thinking about a thing, and arational to refer to those other, more subterranean, thoughts that shape our activities and behaviours in ways that are not always directly accessible to introspection.

Cognitive behaviours and arational behaviours occur at many levels internally, we can consciously control our breathing, and otherwise arationally allow it to be managed by bodily processes that we are not conscious of. This can extend into seemingly cognitive activities such as talking, mathematics or the creation of art. It is not, I believe, a necessarily negative that behaviours which are not mediated by thoughts at a cognitive level occur, in fact often it a can be advantageous.

When we are learning a new skill often we first engage with it on a cognitive level and it is only with taking repeated effort on multiple occasions that these skills become natural to us. With many activities, we are often better at them, the less cognitively engaged with the efforts we are. There’s no surer way to miss a goal than to think too deeply about the angle at which one should kick the ball; from crocheting to kissing there are many activities which are spoiled by over thinking.

This concentration and cognition is also taxing. There is significant evidence (Baumeister et al. 1998, Vohs et al. 2012, Vohs et al. 2014) to show that decision making capacity in particular is a resource which depletes as we use it. When I am clearheaded it is easy for me to choose to eat a healthy salad for lunch rather than the deep-fried option, whereas when I’m tired and hungry after a long day, and have skipped lunch, it is hard to make my way past Burger King without succumbing to that temptation. There are many ways in which we thoughtlessly engage in activities, particularly routine activities, which may allow us to focus our reserves of mental energy on those issues which seem to be of greatest importance.

The great danger arises where we, like Juliet, engage in activities which are not apparent to us on a phenomenally conscious level. The danger is not simply that we engage in activities that we would objectively believe to be wrong – in Juliet’s case favouring white students over black students – but also that we are blind to it.

Schwitzgebel’s Cure

Schwitzgebel holds that it is with great effort that we can shift our arational behaviours, a difficulty is that we have to be aware of the requirement to shift our behaviours. For Schwitzgebel, as a believer in dispositional belief, he finds the suggestion challenging that Juliet can be of two minds regarding a matter such as race. What he asks is Juliet’s “general attitude” what does she believe about race when she is jogging, or mowing the lawn? Which could be reformed into the question what does Juliet think about race when there is nothing in her mind, or her environment, that raises the salience of race? If there was a black man jogging behind Juliet as she approached a choice of jogging route that would take her through a dark park, or alternatively along a brightly lit shopping street her beliefs about race could be different from a scenario where a black girl guide approached her asking Juliet to buy cookies.

Schwitzgebel holds that we cannot hold baldly contradictory beliefs, I concur that this state could cause problems for an individual affected, but that we must be aware of this lack of coherence before it becomes problematic, certainly that is the thesis of Festinger’s (1962) theory of cognitive dissonance which posits cognitive consistency as a psychological need that drives us through the mechanism of an adverse state of arousal i.e. ‘dissonance’.

Schwitzgebel asserts that it is very hard to understand what one means when one says that someone believes two opposing things at once, which is reasonable, and that it is hard to understand what mechanisms may be at play in the mind and brain of a person who holds conflicting beliefs, which is also reasonable, but then goes on to hold that we should not consider such possibilities because they are difficult, which seems to be much less reasonable.

Internal Conflict, Belief States and Information

There is a large literature about what happens when we hold thoughts that are incoherent with each other. Fontanari et al. (2012) have shown that strongly valent/salient negative affect is phenomenally available to people who are experiencing cognitive dissonance. Gawronski (2012) has also argued that this negative affect has an epistemological utility: loosely, if we want to avoid having this negative experiences we resolve these internal conflicts when we encounter them.

The wrinkle which I want to introduce to the scenario of Juliet’s implicit racism is one of choice blindness. Just as it has been shown that we are often unaware of changes which have occurred in our environment – the classic experiment being Simon and Levin’s 1998 one where a conversation partner was swapped for second person in an experiment that occurred in a real life environment which found that a significant proportion of the participants do not notice that this change has occurred – we seem to only notice the amount of information available in our environment sufficient to function within it.

A process similar to this failure to detect changes in the external environment has also been demonstrated by Johannson et al. (2008) where these changes relate to decisions that we have made. In a variety of experiments Johannson had participants make a choice between two different objects A or B and then through sleight of hand swapped A for B, and had them come up with explanations for why they made their decision (even though they had chosen the opposite option).

In most cases the participants did not notice the switch, in a minority of cases (Johannsson 2005) they were surprised by the decision that they had apparently made, but were content to extemporise reasons for why they had chosen option B over A, even though the opposite was  true. Naturally those who claimed to observe that deception occur were more suspicious in later rounds but even including those who suspected the nature of the experiment, even including all their subsequent observations, with the most distinctive options presented, and under decision making conditions most favourable to discerning deception, this deception was observed in less than half the cases.

If, in an environment  tailored to reduce all external effects, where we’re focussed entirely on a cognitive activity and we are still, for the greater part, oblivious to the decisions that we have made, then how apparent is Juliet’s behaviour going to be when she is considering her racism, or lack of it (as far as she is cognitively aware)?

Assuming that Juliet is an implicit racist, rather than a secret racist, when she thinks of incidents which occurred where race was a factor she will think of those incidents that she attended to as Chen et al (2007) noted, memory encoding depends upon attention. Having not attended to those incidents where she was implicitly racist Juliet will only recall those incidents which she was cognitively engaged with, thus the episodes where she was not racist.

As Saul’s 2013 review of implicit bias, and the role it may have in the philosophical community, observes there are many mechanisms through which bias can occur, many of which are occurring on arational levels of the mind, with even female feminist philosophers exhibiting behaviours which disadvantage other females.

Discussion

The risk of believing that we are correct in our beliefs (whatever those beliefs may be) are that we become more open to erring in directions contrary to our consciously held beliefs because we will become blinded to the possibility that we may err. Given that our episodic memory requires that we have to attend to an incident if we are to be subsequently capable of recalling it, given that we are often blind to the decisions, or actions, that we have taken, and that we are capable of creating post-hoc confabulations about our reasoning for making decisions that we have, in fact, not made, this implies that we can rely on our minds, and our memories, to provide us only with scenarios and situations that seem to be evidence than corroborate our beliefs about who we think ourselves to be.

There is also the possibility that the cognitive dissonance mechanism does not simply have an epistemological effect, there is the potential that it reinforces our introspective sense of not holding socially negatively valanced implicit biases. Consider a man who is a subject in a patriarchal, despotic, conservative religious state, and who is not a misogynist. Not being misogynistic could be detrimental to his social standing, it could be seen to be a betrayal of his culture, non-misogynistic thoughts and deeds are likely to be scorned by his peers and family. Consequently this predisposition is likely to be a source of negative affect for him. He won’t want to see himself in such light, he’ll want to see himself as a good misogynist like everybody else. When he recalls his past behaviour, is he likely to recall the times when he didn’t oppress a woman when the opportunity presented itself, or will he recall an emotionally positive experience? Recalling our implicit racist Juliet, if presented with evidence that she behaved in a racist manner isn’t she likely to defend her sense of who she is, all the stronger, because she will be rejecting this vision of herself that is uglier than she thinks herself to be? Contrast that with Juliet’s twin sister Jennifer, who holds the same prejudices but is vigilant to them and attempts to compensate for them in those behaviours that she is cognitively aware of. If you were a young black student, which academic’s class would you prefer to attend?

Thus if we think of ourselves as a priori bigots, who are trying not to be so, then we can increase the likelihood of behaving in a less bigoted fashion, while also experiencing the positive emotional affect associated with not being objectively horrible.

Bibliography

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