Essay On Implicit Biases

Contemporary prejudice has become subtler and occasionally reflects unintentional intergroup biases (Monteith et al., 2015). Sometimes these implicit biases have a greater impact on an individual’s discriminatory behavior than explicit biases (Robb & Stone, 2016). As a consequence, there has been increased judicial consideration for psychological research on implicit biases in legal testimony over the past two decades (Aiken et al., 2013).
The most widely used measure for studying implicit social cognition is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), developed at the University of Washington in 1998 (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). In this test, an indirect measure of response time is used to examine the strength of participants’ implicit
Race and gender are perhaps the most extensively researched categories within the literature on prejudice and implicit biases. Similarly, weight and age biases are the most consistent in society at large and can have dangerous healthcare implications (Waller et al., 2012). Because the research in those areas is so extensive and those topics are, for the most part, no longer taboo discussion topics, I have decided to shift focus to more widely stigmatized groups, the disabled and mentally
On a structural level, research shows significant group-based disparities in employment, income, incarceration rates, and healthcare treatment (Monteith et al., 2015). These negative effects are the result of not just overt, but also subtle biases that are prevalent in American society (Monteith et al., 2015). My experience in the US Attorney’s Office (henceforth, USAO) gave me practical experience in the enforcement of laws meant to protect some of the most vulnerable groups in our society, most often through the CRA (1964) and ADA