New York University psychologists led by Elizabeth Phelps have found thatmany people make decisions based on unconscious racial biases. ? Decisions in the world of business, law, education, medicine and even daily everyday interactions depend to a great extent on trust ?, explain the authors, who in a work published in the journalPNAS they conclude that who we trust is conditioned by unconscious racial biases.
In their experiments, Phelps and his colleagues asked 50 participants of various races towill “intuitively” assess the reliability of the individuals represented in more than 300 photographs of black, white, Asian, Hispanic and mixed race men, on a scale of one to nine. The researchers found thatparticipants’ implicit racial attitudes predicted inequalities in the perceived reliability of black and white faces. Individuals whose tests showed a stronger bias towards white people were more likely to judge white faces as more reliable than the rest, regardless of the participant’s race, explicit beliefs, or political leanings.
In a similar experiment, the authors asked another group of participants to play a game that involvedinvest money in a partner, who could then share a part of what has been achieved or keep it all. The authors found that participants’ implicit racial biases – but not their explicit beliefs or their own race – predicted racial inequalities in the amount of money they wanted to invest in their peers. These unconscious biases come into play when we quickly assess a stranger about whom we have no more information, Phelps says.
