How racial bias works -- and how to disrupt it

Our brains create categories to make sense of the world, recognize patterns and make quick decisions. But this ability to categorize also exacts a heavy toll in the form of unconscious bias. In this powerful talk, psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt explores how our biases unfairly target Black people at all levels of society -- from schools and social media to policing and criminal justice -- and discusses how creating points of friction can help us actively interrupt and address this troubling problem.

Some years ago,

I was on an airplane with my son
who was just five years old at the time.

My son was so excited
about being on this airplane with Mommy.

He's looking all around
and he's checking things out

and he's checking people out.

And he sees this man, and he says,

"Hey! That guy looks like Daddy!"

And I look at the man,

and he didn't look anything
at all like my husband,

nothing at all.

And so then I start
looking around on the plane,

and I notice this man was
the only black guy on the plane.

And I thought,

"Alright.

I'm going to have to have
a little talk with my son

about how not all
black people look alike."

My son, he lifts his head up,
and he says to me,

"I hope he doesn't rob the plane."

And I said, "What? What did you say?"

And he says, "Well, I hope that man
doesn't rob the plane."

And I said, "Well, why would you say that?

You know Daddy wouldn't rob a plane."

And he says, "Yeah, yeah,
yeah, well, I know."

And I said, "Well,
why would you say that?"

And he looked at me
with this really sad face,

and he says,

"I don't know why I said that.

I don't know why I was thinking that."

We are living with such severe
racial stratification

that even a five-year-old can tell us
what's supposed to happen next,

even with no evildoer,

even with no explicit hatred.

This association between
blackness and crime

made its way into the mind
of my five-year-old.

It makes its way into all of our children,

into all of us.

Our minds are shaped by
the racial disparities

we see out in the world

and the narratives that help us
to make sense of the disparities we see:

"Those people are criminal."

"Those people are violent."

"Those people are to be feared."

When my research team
brought people into our lab

and exposed them to faces,

we found that exposure to black faces
led them to see blurry images of guns

with greater clarity and speed.

Bias cannot only control what we see,

but where we look.

We found that prompting people
to think of violent crime

can lead them to direct their eyes
onto a black face

and away from a white face.

Prompting police officers
to think of capturing and shooting

and arresting

leads their eyes to settle
on black faces, too.

Bias can infect every aspect
of our criminal justice system.

In a large data set
of death-eligible defendants,

we found that looking more black
more than double their chances

of receiving a death sentence --

at least when their victims were white.

This effect is significant,

even though we controlled
for the severity of the crime

and the defendant's attractiveness.

And no matter what we controlled for,

we found that black
people were punished

in proportion to the blackness
of their physical features:

the more black,

the more death-worthy.

Bias can also influence
how teachers discipline students.

My colleagues and I have found
that teachers express a desire

to discipline a black
middle school student more harshly

than a white student

for the same repeated infractions.

In a recent study,

we're finding that teachers
treat black students as a group

but white students as individuals.

If, for example,
one black student misbehaves

and then a different black student
misbehaves a few days later,

the teacher responds
to that second black student

as if he had misbehaved twice.

It's as though the sins of one child

get piled onto the other.

We create categories
to make sense of the world,

to assert some control and coherence

to the stimuli that we're constantly
being bombarded with.

Categorization and the bias that it seeds

allow our brains to make judgments
more quickly and efficiently,

and we do this by instinctively
relying on patterns

that seem predictable.

Yet, just as the categories we create
allow us to make quick decisions,

they also reinforce bias.

So the very things that help us
to see the world

also can blind us to it.

They render our choices effortless,

friction-free.

Yet they exact a heavy toll.

So what can we do?

We are all vulnerable to bias,

but we don't act on bias all the time.

There are certain conditions
that can bring bias alive

and other conditions that can muffle it.

Let me give you an example.

Many people are familiar
with the tech company Nextdoor.

So, their whole purpose is to create
stronger, healthier, safer neighborhoods.

And so they offer this online space

where neighbors can gather
and share information.

Yet, Nextdoor soon found
that they had a problem

with racial profiling.

In the typical case,

people would look outside their window

and see a black man
in their otherwise white neighborhood

and make the snap judgment
that he was up to no good,

even when there was no evidence
of criminal wrongdoing.

In many ways, how we behave online

is a reflection of how
we behave in the world.

But what we don't want to do
is create an easy-to-use system

that can amplify bias
and deepen racial disparities,

rather than dismantling them.

So the cofounder of Nextdoor
reached out to me and to others

to try to figure out what to do.

And they realized that
to curb racial profiling on the platform,

they were going to have to add friction;

that is, they were going
to have to slow people down.

So Nextdoor had a choice to make,

and against every impulse,

they decided to add friction.

And they did this by adding
a simple checklist.

There were three items on it.

First, they asked users to pause

and think, "What was this person doing
that made him suspicious?"

The category "black man"
is not grounds for suspicion.

Second, they asked users to describe
the person's physical features,

not simply their race and gender.

Third, they realized that a lot of people

didn't seem to know
what racial profiling was,

nor that they were engaging in it.

So Nextdoor provided them
with a definition

and told them that it was
strictly prohibited.

Most of you have seen
those signs in airports

and in metro stations,
"If you see something, say something."

Nextdoor tried modifying this.

"If you see something suspicious,

say something specific."

And using this strategy,
by simply slowing people down,

Nextdoor was able to curb
racial profiling by 75 percent.

Now, people often will say to me,

"You can't add friction
in every situation, in every context,

and especially for people who make
split-second decisions all the time."

But it turns out we can add friction

to more situations than we think.

Working with the Oakland Police Department

in California,

I and a number of my colleagues
were able to help the department

to reduce the number of stops they made

of people who were not
committing any serious crimes.

And we did this by pushing officers

to ask themselves a question
before each and every stop they made:

"Is this stop intelligence-led,

yes or no?"

In other words,

do I have prior information
to tie this particular person

to a specific crime?

By adding that question

to the form officers complete
during a stop,

they slow down, they pause,

they think, "Why am I considering
pulling this person over?"

In 2017, before we added that
intelligence-led question to the form,

officers made about 32,000 stops
across the city.

In that next year,
with the addition of this question,

that fell to 19,000 stops.

African-American stops alone
fell by 43 percent.

And stopping fewer black people
did not make the city any more dangerous.

In fact, the crime rate continued to fall,

and the city became safer for everybody.

So one solution can come from reducing
the number of unnecessary stops.

Another can come from improving
the quality of the stops

officers do make.

And technology can help us here.

We all know about George Floyd's death,

because those who tried to come to his aid
held cell phone cameras

to record that horrific, fatal
encounter with the police.

But we have all sorts of technology
that we're not putting to good use.

Police departments across the country

are now required to wear body-worn cameras

so we have recordings of not only
the most extreme and horrific encounters

but of everyday interactions.

With an interdisciplinary
team at Stanford,

we've begun to use
machine learning techniques

to analyze large numbers of encounters.

This is to better understand
what happens in routine traffic stops.

What we found was that

even when police officers
are behaving professionally,

they speak to black drivers
less respectfully than white drivers.

In fact, from the words
officers use alone,

we could predict whether they were talking
to a black driver or a white driver.

The problem is that the vast majority
of the footage from these cameras

is not used by police departments

to understand what's
going on on the street

or to train officers.

And that's a shame.

How does a routine stop
turn into a deadly encounter?

How did this happen
in George Floyd's case?

How did it happen in others?

When my eldest son was 16 years old,

he discovered that
when white people look at him,

they feel fear.

Elevators are the worst, he said.

When those doors close,

people are trapped in this tiny space

with someone they have been taught
to associate with danger.

My son senses their discomfort,

and he smiles to put them at ease,

to calm their fears.

When he speaks,

their bodies relax.

They breathe easier.

They take pleasure in his cadence,

his diction, his word choice.

He sounds like one of them.

I used to think that my son
was a natural extrovert like his father.

But I realized at that moment,
in that conversation,

that his smile was not a sign
that he wanted to connect

with would-be strangers.

It was a talisman he used
to protect himself,

a survival skill he had honed
over thousands of elevator rides.

He was learning to accommodate the tension
that his skin color generated

and that put his own life at risk.

We know that the brain is wired for bias,

and one way to interrupt that bias
is to pause and to reflect

on the evidence of our assumptions.

So we need to ask ourselves:

What assumptions do we bring
when we step onto an elevator?

Or an airplane?

How do we make ourselves aware
of our own unconscious bias?

Who do those assumptions keep safe?

Who do they put at risk?

Until we ask these questions

and insist that our schools
and our courts and our police departments

and every institution do the same,

we will continue to allow bias

to blind us.

And if we do,

none of us are truly safe.

Thank you.