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This story appeared in the Spring 2020 Letters & Science magazine.

A few years ago, Patricia Devine was attempting to rile up a class of graduate students, and she settled on a sure-fire topic: prejudice.

“One of the issues I was trying to figure out was whether we could trust what people report verbally given that their spontaneous reactions often belied their verbal reports,” says Devine, UW-Madison professor of psychology and director of the UW’s Prejudice and Intergroup Relations Laboratory. “People tell us that they don’t want to be prejudiced. They don’t want to be biased. But there’s this competing notion that they’re telling you that because that’s socially desirable, socially acceptable. Hence many people denied the validity of the verbal reports in favor of their difficult-to-control spontaneous reactions. I asked, is it possible for both to be true?”

Her students, at least initially, were stunned into silence.

It’s a thorny question Devine—and the rest of modern society as well—has been wrestling with for most of her career. But after nearly three decades of identifying and studying the problem of implicit bias—the idea that it is, in fact, possible for a person to simultaneously reject prejudice and still react to stereotypes and behave in prejudicial ways—there’s nobody who knows it quite as well as she does. Her 1989 dissertation, the one that first laid out the conundrum, is among the most cited in the social sciences.

“When I started working on these issues, there weren’t a lot of people working on them,” says Devine. “And now the field has transformed and it’s one of the central issues.”

Devine’s original dissertation on the conundrum of implicit bias is among the most cited in the social sciences.

Devine’s focus has changed, too, from identification to eradication. Over the past decade, she and a team of UW scientists have developed an interactive workshop designed to break bias by making people aware of how insidiously it takes hold. Participants begin by taking the Harvard Implicit Association Test, a reactive experience that measures the strength of a person’s associations between social categories and stereotypic attributes. Participants quickly discover there’s a reason why we so easily pair, say, black with athleticism and white with academics.

“Students walk across campus, they see a tall Black man, and some may think he’s on the basketball team,” notes Devine. “They don’t run up and say, ‘Are you on the basketball team?’ They have no evidence whatsoever bearing on the validity of the assumption. But the mind treats that inference as though it’s valid evidence and the inference leads to the perpetuation of the bias over time. This is tricky stuff to overcome.”

The real key, says Devine, is inducing motivation. To make any progress at all, individuals must want to overcome their own unconscious biases.

“We point out that the associations are just that—associations,” says Devine, leaning forward earnestly. “The ease with which these associations come to mind doesn’t mean that they reflect your values. If your values are different, then we help you understand that these associations function like a habit, and we can use the power of your conscious mind to try to overcome those habitual responses. The next step is to tune into or recognize when they are most vulnerable to responding with bias that they don’t intend and don’t want. Making people aware of these moments is important because these are the leverage points to address the unwanted bias. That’s the leverage point. These are the moments when you can do something different.”

The “something different” has taken the form of tools Devine likes to refer to as “bias disruptors,” a set of five tools she and her colleagues have developed. Tools like stereotype replacement, where you might look at a disheveled man walking toward you on the street, and, instead of assuming he’s a threatening homeless man and crossing the street to avoid him, consider that he could just as easily be a businessman coming home from a casual workout at the gym. Other strategies involve focusing on the individual rather than making stereotypic assumptions about the person based on social group membership and looking for opportunities to connect with groups we tend to stereotype.

“We don’t just bring people to the brink of awareness and then say, ‘So don’t do it,’” says Devine. “We try to help them figure out how not to do it, how to live their values, specifically, what they could do instead. Further, we are straightforward in noting that breaking the bias habit, just like breaking other habits, requires sustained effort over time. And we’ve done the research to evaluate the impact of our bias habit-breaking intervention.”

That impact can be eye-popping. In 2015, Devine partnered with Molly Carnes, the director of the UW’s Center for Women’s Health Research, to examine, and potentially reduce, gender bias in departmental units covering all fields of science, engineering, and medicine across UW-Madison. Over the course of the two-year study, 92 departments were broken into two groups—46 departments served as control departments and 46 departments received the bias training. At the end of the study, which made use of Devine’s bias disruptor tools, faculty in the latter group reported engaging in more bias-reducing actions and experiencing a more inclusive departmental climate. These departments also saw their hiring rate for women jump from 33 to 47 percent, while the control group’s hiring rate remained fixed at 33 percent.

“That translated to 31 new women being hired in those departments,” says Devine. “it’s very exciting that we see this impact play out in a really consequential way.”

we help you understand that these associations function like a habit, and we can use the power of your conscious mind to try to overcome those habitual responses.

Carnes is now leading the Bias Reduction in Internal Medicine (BRIM) Initiative, a national effort to use similar strategies to reduce not just gender bias, but bias arising from other negative group stereotypes as well (e.g., race, sexual orientation, disability, obesity).

“-As part of this, we’re looking to see if changes in attitudes and behaviors made by individual faculty members in departments of medicine can influence department climate, which is related to faculty retention and physician burnout.”

If the medical community can embrace this, it stands to reason that other industries—military, police, corporations—can do so as well, Devine points out. “What is perhaps most exciting about the program of work is that people can become agents of change within themselves and within the social contexts in which they live and work.”

But even backed by strong evidence that her bias habit-breaking approach is working, Devine would be the first to admit the battle’s far from won. The modern digital landscape, for instance, can be a daily superhighway of bias reinforcement, with countless social media platforms influencing younger generations with new (and old) insidious stereotypes. Along with William Cox, an assistant scientist, Devine has broadened the workshop to apply to biases beyond race or gender, particularly in the online space.

She is also working on interventions. With associate professor Kristin Shutts and graduate student Katharine Scott, she is developing ways parents can identify and combat bias in their children. And with Emily Dix, another graduate student, she is developing an intervention aimed at white people who deny the negative impacts of bias. Assessing the outcome of these interventions (which she is working on with graduate student Megan Bruun) will show how well they’re working. Devine recently received a William T. Grant Foundation research award to work with researchers in South Carolina on using unconscious bias training with teachers to reduce racial and behavioral disparities in the classroom. The research possibilities, it seems, could encompass another three decades.

Devine is ready for it.

“Recognizing that we are vulnerable to these biases, and that we could take steps to address them, that’s just the beginning of the journey,” says Devine.