Extended Implicit Bias: When the Metaphysics and Ethics of Implicit Bias Collide

It has recently been argued that to tackle social injustice, implicit biases and unjust social structures should be targeted equally because they sustain and ontologically overlap with each other. Here I develop this thought further by relating it to the hypothesis of extended cognition. I argue that if we accept common conditions for extended cognition then people’s implicit biases are often partly realized by and so extended into unjust social structures. This supports the view that we should counteract psychological and social contributors to injustice equally. But it also has a significant downside. If unjust social structures are part of people’s minds then dismantling these structures becomes more difficult than it currently is, as this will then require us to overcome widely accepted ethical and legal barriers protecting people’s bodily and personal integrity. Thus, while there are good grounds to believe that people’s biases and unjust social structures ontologically overlap, there are also strong ethical reasons to reject this view. Metaphysical and ethical intuitions about implicit bias hence collide in an important way.

Dataset: Knowledge and attitude retention following an implicit bias classroom workshop

Background: Baylor College of Medicine provides a classroom-based implicit bias workshop to all third-year medical students to increase students’ awareness of their unconscious bias and develop strategies for reducing health care disparities. The workshop meets our immediate goals and objectives. However, we are unsure if the benefit would be long-term or diminish over time. Methods: To examine the concept retention from the implicit bias classroom workshop, we administered a self-developed seven-item seven-point Likert-scale survey to our medical students at pre-, post-, and one-year post-workshop attendance. Results: The data set was comprised of survey results from two cohorts of our third and fourth-year medical students from 2018 to 2020 and included 289 completed records at three measurement points. The data included: Student Identifiers, Sex, Race/Ethnicity, Student Enrollment Type, Cohort, and three repeated measures results for each of the seven items, which were documented in wide format. The data may be of interest to those who wish to examine how factors including elapsed time, race, and sex may associate with attitudes and understandings of implicit bias following related training, and those interested in analytical methods on longitudinal research in general.

A Brief Online Implicit Bias Intervention for School Mental Health Clinicians

Clinician bias has been identified as a potential contributor to persistent healthcare disparities across many medical specialties and service settings. Few studies have examined strategies to reduce clinician bias, especially in mental healthcare, despite decades of research evidencing service and outcome disparities in adult and pediatric populations. This manuscript describes an intervention development study and a pilot feasibility trial of the Virtual Implicit Bias Reduction and Neutralization Training (VIBRANT) for mental health clinicians in schools—where most youth in the U.S. access mental healthcare. Clinicians (N = 12) in the feasibility study—a non-randomized open trial—rated VIBRANT as highly usable, appropriate, acceptable, and feasible for their school-based practice. Preliminarily, clinicians appeared to demonstrate improvements in implicit bias knowledge, use of bias-management strategies, and implicit biases (as measured by the Implicit Association Test [IAT]) post-training. Moreover, putative mediators (e.g., clinicians’ VIBRANT strategies use, IAT D scores) and outcome variables (e.g., clinician-rated quality of rapport) generally demonstrated correlations in the expected directions. These pilot results suggest that brief and highly scalable online interventions such as VIBRANT are feasible and promising for addressing implicit bias among healthcare providers (e.g., mental health clinicians) and can have potential downstream impacts on minoritized youth’s care experience.

Analyzing the Role of Implicit Bias From a DisCrit Perspective

Using a disability studies/critical race theory (Discrit) lens, the authors reviewed and analyzed specific literature within the pyramid model (PM) framework—a three-tier hierarchical framework for promoting social-emotional competence and reducing challenging behavior among young children—to understand the model's framing of implicit bias and the specific strategies noted in the literature that help teachers to recognize and counteract implicit bias and subsequently reduce disciplinary inequities among Black preschool children. Findings revealed that although the PM literature discussed, defined, and emphasized the importance of cultural responsivity, it did not engage critically with the construct of implicit bias (i.e., racism and ableism), specifically as it relates to the experiences of children most vulnerable to disciplinary sanction. This chapter ends with suggestions to help readers rethink the PM framework as a way to shift practice toward more equitable experiences for Black children in their earliest years of schooling.