1 Discovery and the Scientist s Duty to Justice Mahzarin R. Banaji Harvard University Mahzarin R. Banaji 2002 Sage Presidential Symposium, 3 rd Annual meetings of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Savannah GA, February 1, 2002. This lecture is based on the DeVane Lecture in part and adds new data and new arguments focus on a duty to justice. I am indebted to two people in preparing these remarks. To Brian Nosek I am indebted for his energetic brainstorming about the meaning of the evidence. To Elaine Scarry, I am indebted for her book On Beauty and Being Just that inspired the theme I have chosen and many of the specific ideas in it (in particular, her paper on the topic titled Beauty and the Scholar s Duty to Justice). For Scarry, the beauty of poetry and fine literature is the impetus to a duty to justice. For me, it would be the discoveries showing the deep connection between the individual and the social group, especially in its unconscious form, that constitutes the basis of a duty to justice. By a duty to justice I do not wish to invoke a special act that any individual scientist must carry out every day or even on a single occasion. I take seriously the notion that Scarry and others have emphasized she, for example, says: I take it as a given that the central social responsibility of a teacher is to teach, and if possible, to teach well (p. 21). In conceiving of a duty to justice I can imagine no more central a role than this. I focus on the scientist-teacher, of which there are shining examples known to each of us, and I use the term discovery to include the act of unearthing something new as well as the communication of such knowledge in all its forms: by traditional instruction, by collaboration, and by example. So I would rephrase Scarry s sentiment slightly to say that the central social responsibility of the scientist is to discover, and if possible, to communicate that discovery well. To do this and nothing else would be sufficient to meet one s duty to justice. But today the hope is that we try to go a bit further because of the context that Claude Steele has provided. Events outside the academy are the focus of our attention with an urgency that would not have been forthcoming if they had only involved foreign lands and foreign people.
2 I offer a somewhat personal account by revealing that I acquired my belief in the dignity of the individual, most prominently by learning about India s unique path to independence from British rule, and the right of a people to self-determination. But it was in India that I learned about blatant, and therefore dangerous prejudices, while in the United States, I have studied less blatant and therefore dangerous prejudices. Both countries offer stark examples of threats to the dignity of the individual because of membership, ascribed or acquired, in social groups in Hyderabad s marriage market, for example, a skin imperceptibly darker than another will require a higher dowry and if lucky, a permit to a lifetime of minor abuses; in New Haven and Newtowne (the original name of the city of Cambridge), a skin darker than another is likely to fetch a bullet, and if lucky, merely a permit to a lifetime of minor abuses. Our focus has been on the unconscious mental roots of such threats to the dignity of the individual, that is to say their origin in thought and feeling not always detected by the conscious mind. We are interested in them, for by their very nature, they can deceive the senses and consciousness, existing as they do in the less examined, and until recently, less examinable, parts of the mind. From this work on the mental mechanics of unconscious prejudice, we can conclude that the evidence gives new meaning to the phrase eternal vigilance for the facts and figures that have accumulated show that the threats to just treatment lie in every mind. Let me make my point with a familiar and beloved figure -- the 16 th president of the United States. Opponent of slavery, author of the emancipation proclamation, Abraham Lincoln changed American history while elevating the standards by which the term justice for all came to be understood here and elsewhere. In what is arguably among the greatest documents of human freedom he set his hand and affixed the seal of the United States to the words all persons held as slaves shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom. For this act alone, Lincoln rises above other American presidents here and elsewhere. Albert Einstein s assessment of another freedom fighter, Mahatma Gandhi, comes closer to depicting this American President than perhaps any other: Generations
3 to come Einstein said of the Mahatma, it may well be, will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth. In dissolving the last system of slavery on the planet while holding the Union together, Abraham Lincoln evokes that sort of assessment. So let me pose a paradox that will likely chill your spine. Abraham Lincoln also said the following words, whose place in assessing him is much debated by historians: I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. (In a debate with Stephen Douglas) In case we are led to the thought that Lincoln said these words only for political gain during an election campaign, the historian John Hope Franklin (From Slavery to Freedom, p. 189) reminds us further that in 1864 Lincoln explicitly worked to colonize emancipated slaves by assigning $100,000 for their voluntary emigration from Washington DC to Haiti and Liberia. Calling Black leaders to the White House, he made the following pitch: Your race suffer greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason why we should be separated. Lincoln was not offering to pack his bags for Europe. How should we understand both sets of beliefs, both sets of actions? In Lincoln s mind was there an acceptable psychological or moral consistency between the famous aspiration expressed in his 2 nd inaugural address With malice toward none; with charity for all and his offering emancipated slaves a free boat ride to Liberia? Did he believe the emancipation proclamation fundamentally to be an act of justice as he himself said it was, while also believing that people of African descent were inherently inferior?
4 I will argue, differently than those who seek the one true Lincoln that both Lincolns are true that such fractures in thought, in feeling, and in behavior are fundamental characteristics of every mind. For me in today s context, a duty to justice compels me to provoke an unmasking of ordinary folk like myself, by myself and for myself. Such unmasking can come with a cost, for confronting and disseminating an unpopular view even among the safe haven of my colleagues is not a simple task. But it is a cost that may prove to be worthwhile when compared with the potential benefit of such confrontation. From the lessons we now have from so many labs, we know something about how the unconscious mind functions in social context, and we can build a case for the minute ways in which mental due process is denied. Data: We create the conditions under which it is relatively difficult to respond with deliberate control and in line with conscious intention. We look at what appear to be the implicit associations between concepts that represent social groups and various attributes. When the attribute is one of variation along a simple good-bad dimension, we call it an implicit attitude, to fit it to what we know from a long history of research on attitudes. (New Web data) When we measure these associations we see that the strength of negative associations with disadvantaged groups is strong. Here are a few examples: 2-3K in the new tests (kids, weight), 150-200K in others (race). There are some discoveries that are so robust and so well-replicated across different laboratories that we can speak of them with confidence. Dozens of studies, using different techniques of indirect measurement have shown that implicit evaluation or implicit attitudes reveal strong negative attitudes toward those who are socially stigmatized or disadvantaged. (Dissociation from explicit) Cunningham data: Laboratory studies show similar findings in all cases the effects are larger because the lab data have mostly majority and advantaged group members. We plot them in this way to show the variability. If zero represents no bias (equal pairing of good and bad with each of the two categories) then you see that the majority in each case lie to one side of that no-bias zero.
5 But the histogram also shows that the scores are normally distributed and shows the range of possible scores. It is not the case, as may be assumed, that everybody shows a strong and equal bias. This variability is critical for tests that look at the relationship between this and other measures for developing construct and other forms of validity. There is the misperception that because these effects are easy to find (small n s produce the basic effect) that such designs are sufficient to do the hard work to find relationships. Those studies require more powerful designs and we suggest that using multiple measures and removing measurement error provide the conditions to make such an assessment. (see Cunningham, Preacher, Banaji, Psych Science). There are now dozens of such studies and over 30 papers reporting a reliable relationship between the implicit measure of attitude and some other predicted variable posture, eye gaze, aggression, etc. (Eric Uhlmann). Liz Phelps s study was conducted among other reasons to zero-in on whether this thing we measure is an attitude. One way to do it is to work with a system whose involvement in affective learning and memory is well demonstrated. Any introductory book will describe decades worth with non-human animals and with humans most basically, the amydala s role in emotional learning is well implicated. That s not the only brain region that is involved but it is one that is very clearly involved. Amygdala data showing correlation between magnitude of activation in the amygdala to Black compared to White faces and IAT scores. Data such as these make it difficult to assume that the behavioral measure is not a measure that taps some level of affective responding. The remarkable thing about implicit attitudes is that they are not prone to changing in response to the exertion of conscious will in the moment. That is to say, I cannot, on a priming task or using the IAT or GNAT decide which attitude I am willing to communicate. However, conscious attitudes and other inventions appear to influence them in ways that were until recently not clear. In my various informal discussions with people about data that show the use and justified use of baserates in making decisions, I have been struck by the similarity of the argument across individuals across cultures. The argument is that racial profiling (in making bank loans, giving cab rides, screening at airports, stopping on the highway) merely reflects the rational use of information and that it would be unfair to characterize those who endorse
6 such usage as racist in the traditional sense, i.e., those who harbor antipathy toward members of profiled groups. In recent evidence we have from the web, we measured people s willingness to endorse profiling (of Arabs at airports; of using race to identify criminals in the U.S.) and looked at consciously expressed attitudes toward Arab Muslims. Those who endorse racial profiling also endorse conscious dislike of Arab Muslims. Eric Uhlmann calls those who endorse racial profiling items involving bank loans, cab rides, airport stops etc. Bayesian Racists. The question is are Bayesian racists racist in the traditional sense? The data from a college sample replicate the web data in showing a significant relationship between such endorsement and consciously expressed negative attitudes. [as a digresson: Are Bayesian racists Bayesian? Not particularly (data show them to be as bad an others on tests of statistical reasoning and sometimes even less good). In the web data, we also have a measure of implicit attitudes toward Arab Muslims and see a relationship between these two types of attitudes (and between them and RP). Insofar as they two types of attitudes influence each other, it may matter what our conscious attitudes are. It may also matter what the conditions are that feed implicit attitudes. Power of the social situation. There is now evidence of the power of the immediate situation in eliciting different implicit attitudes. If you thought, like me, that these automatic attitudes were relatively invariant to situational manipulation, we should all think again. Buju Dasgupta, Curtis Hardin and Irene Blair along with their collaborators have shown that such is not the case. The presence of an African Am experimenter, an ordinary exercise that focuses one s thoughts on strong women or admired African Americans can provoke a reduction in the usual level of implicit bias. These studies have all been published and more results are forthcoming. (describe Nosek s math data and Lane s July 4 data, if time permits, Devos s data). Final remarks: Elaine Scarry reminds us that the duty to justice question has its origin in words spoken by Socrates in the Crito, the dialogue in which he is offered escape from Athens and refuses. He says: In war and in the lawcourts and everywhere else you must do whatever your city and your country [command], or else persuade [them] that justice is on your side. Like Scarry, I would say that far from any exemption from a duty to justice that other citizens may have, the privilege that comes from having as we do, the tools for discovery, for argument, for speaking and writing, propel us, in the Rawlian sense, to comply with just arrangements where they exist and to assist in the creation of
7 just arrangements where they don t yet exist. When discoveries about the limits on our automatic feelings and thoughts are available in the work of so many of us, it should provide the impetus to ask questions about the nature of our minds their obvious limits, their impressive flexibility. And then, given such knowledge, about the just arrangements that are within reach and the just arrangements that await creation with small stretches of the imagination. To those fellow travelers doing work on implicit social cognition, I would say that the remarkable feature of our joint effort is the ability to demonstrate that we ourselves are susceptible to the biases we have traditionally shown in others. Now, more so than ever, the case can be made that solutions need to take into account this knowledge, because of the meaning it gives to the term demonstrable. This is not a luxury afforded to others how much more would the influence of a Milgram experiment be, if even after being told about the manipulation and the result of others, one could not help but show the effect, in that moment. I, who admit to showing many of these biases and in quite robust ways, see them as saying something about my own mind and what has come to be in it in part because of the time and culture in which I live, in part because of the settings I have willingly chosen because they benefit me or assure my safety. However imperceptible they are and however resistant I might be to acknowledge their presence, I conclude that these do reflect who I am. And each unmasking reminds me that if I am to be a participant in the democratic process, and if I am to pay more than lip service to a duty to justice, that eternal vigilance about the threats to the dignity of the individual is an ever greater need. Attorney General Ashcroft has a new and unprecedented set of powers. PL 107-56 passed on Oct 26, 2001 is called Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act. The goal is safety for Americans, a worthwhile goal in my mind as I travel and do my business. But the context in which the Act was framed and the explicit powers that it now renders raise the troubling question of their potential effects on the civil rights of citizens and non-citizens. (I ll mention only a few of the newly created authorizations: indefinite detention without right to counsel, detention and deportation of innocent people who have unknowingly associated with a terrorist; returning the right to the CIA to spy on U.S. citizens (a right that had been taken away because of abuses during the Vietnam War) and the requirement that universities comply in providing information about foreign
8 students courses taken, library books read, etc.). Again, we return to Socrates: In war and in the lawcourts and everywhere else you must do what your city and your country command, or else persuade them that justice is on your side. The USA Patriot Act needs thoughtful discussion. Given what we know about the threats to mental due process, there is a need, even an urgency, to ask about its various implications. To make the connection between implicit social cognition single events taking on the order of 500 milliseconds and large scale social systems not only seems, but is, an unimaginable distance. But I remind us that science has been there before. In the 1930s, the astrophysicist Subramaniam Chandrashekar used the orbital mechanics of a single electron (about as microscopic a phenomenon as one can imagine) to predict the existence of black holes about as macroscopic a phenomenon as one can imagine. The notion that the mechanics of the tiniest of structures could serve not just as a metaphor to understand the other but rather that the mechanism of one was the mechanism of the other was an outrageous idea. Outrageous enough that it was a full 50 years later that it served as the basis of his Nobel Prize. I admit to harboring the belief that even in matters of the connection between mind and society, that we imagine a bridge between the micro mechanics of the mind, and the macro social universe they reflect and shape, in just that way.