The paper is the fruit of a 3 year interdisciplinary funded research project, that examined the effects of moralized feedback about individuals' racial biases. We found that blaming people for their racial biases didn't, as some have worried, cause people to double down on, and increase their racial biases. In fact, it made people more likely to form explicit intentions to take anti-racist action. This is highly relevant to the ways that implicit bias training is delivered, which tends to be in an exculpatory tone. It is also relevant to the various conversations, spurred on by the current activism of Black Lives Matter, that we should be having about racial bias and systemic racism. Blame, attributions of, and importantly taking responsibility, can be an important part of those conversations. Jules Holroyd has argued, in earlier work ('Responsibility for Implicit Bias' (2012)), that people are often morally responsible for their implicit biases, and acknowledging this is an important part of acknowledging and working to overcome them. She has also outlined how implicit bias can be a factor in sustaining institutional racism ('Implicit bias and the anatomy of institutional racism' (2015)).
New interdisciplinary publication
