Implicit Bias and Microaggressions

Implicit bias and microaggressions are two important and relatable concepts that can significantly impact an individual’s social interactions, institutional practices, and overall societal experiences.

These forces are often subtle and unintentional, yet they play a significant role in determining, usually unknowingly, all kinds of choices people make, including decisions influenced by education, healthcare, employment, and personal relationships.

This article explores what implicit bias and microaggressions are, how they manifest in everyday life, their impacts on affected individuals and communities, and approaches to addressing them.

What Is Implicit Bias?

Implicit bias refers to unconscious attitudes, stereotypes, or assumptions that influence how we perceive, act, and make decisions regarding different groups of people. Implicit bias is different from explicit bias, which is conscious prejudice that a person may admit to.

These biases develop throughout our lives as we absorb messages from our cultural environment, including family upbringing, media representations, educational systems, and social interactions. Even individuals who are consciously opposed to stereotypes and support equality may unconsciously have implicit biases that influence their behaviour in ways that contradict their explicit values.

Key characteristics of implicit bias include:

Unconscious nature: People usually lack awareness about their hidden biases until they see their results emerge from specialised tests or become visible in their behavioural patterns.
Universal presence: All humans possess implicit biases because our brains naturally develop such mental shortcuts when processing information.
Contextual activation: Implicit biases become stronger during ambiguous situations and under time pressure, as well as when their cognitive resources are limited.
Malleability: Although often deeply ingrained, implicit biases can be modified through conscious awareness, exposure to counter-stereotypical examples, and deliberate practice.

How Implicit Bias Manifests

Decision-making and behaviour in these areas are affected by implicit bias.

Practitioners in healthcare may use different diagnostic standards without realisation, depending on the demographic characteristics of a patient. For example, it is shown that black patients' pain reports are often discounted more than the same reports from white patients, resulting in disparity in pain management.

In employment, the use of identical résumés with racial or gender names that indicate racial or gender identity consistently finds that some groups are treated preferentially, with those perceived as white and male often called back more frequently.

In education, teachers may unconsciously hold different expectations for students based on their perceived status, which can affect how they evaluate work, offer assistance, or provide feedback.

In criminal justice, split-second decisions may be influenced by implicit associations between certain racial groups and concepts like criminality or danger, potentially affecting everything from traffic stops to sentencing recommendations.

What Are Microaggressions?

Microaggressions are brief, everyday exchanges that communicate hostile, derogatory, or harmful messages to members of marginalised groups. Psychologist Derald Wing Sue defines microaggressions as "brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioural, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of colour."

While initially conceptualised in terms of race, the framework has expanded to include microaggressions based on gender, sexual orientation, disability status, religion, socioeconomic background, and other identity markers.

Microaggressions generally fall into three categories:

Micro assaults: A person acting with discrimination will intentionally discriminate through verbal or physical means (such as using a slur or excluding people because of their identity)
Microinsults: Rude or insensitive behaviours that subtly convey prejudice (e.g., expressing surprise at a person's articulateness or professional success because of their background)
Microinvalidations: When people tell marginalised individuals they are being sensitive after pointing out discrimination, it amounts to dismissing their thoughts or feelings

Examples of Microaggressions

Microaggressions can take countless forms across different contexts:

Where are you really from? That is the question that may be asked of an Asian. They have already said that they are from Birmingham, so they are perpetual foreigners even if they were born and raised in the United Kingdom.
Telling a gay colleague, "You don't act gay," suggesting there's a specific way gay people should behave and reinforcing stereotypes.
Clutching one's purse or wallet when a black person approaches or enters an elevator, subtly communicating fear or suspicion based on race.
Complimenting a person with a disability for being "inspirational" for performing routine daily activities, objectifying them through what's known as "inspiration porn."
Assuming a woman in a leadership meeting is the assistant rather than a fellow executive reflects gender-based assumptions about professional roles.
Mispronouncing or refusing to learn to pronounce a person's name correctly, signalling that their cultural identity isn't worth the effort of proper recognition.

The Relationship Between Implicit Bias and Microaggressions

There is a close relationship between implicit bias and microaggressions. Microaggressions often involve implicit biases that can be fuelled by our unconscious attitudes, which manifest in subtle behaviours and comments. When it comes to microaggressions, the person committing them is often unaware of the implicit biases they hold.

For example, a teacher who harbours an implicit bias associating Asian students with mathematical aptitude might commit a microaggression by expressing surprise when a South Asian student struggles with math or by automatically directing math-related questions to Asian students more frequently than others.

It is a two-way relationship. Both of these phenomena can increase due to the effects of repeated microaggressions in the real world, which reinforce and create stereotypical associations, thereby prolonging both phenomena in a cycle.

Impact on Recipients

While individual microaggressions might seem minor in isolation (hence the "micro" prefix), their cumulative effect can be profound:

Psychological effects: Research demonstrates that regular exposure to microaggressions is associated with increased symptoms of depression, anxiety, diminished self-esteem, and psychological distress.

Physical health consequences: Chronic exposure to microaggressions can lead to adverse health effects, including hypertension, immune system issues, and increased cortisol levels.

Belonging uncertainty: Individuals may question whether they truly belong in certain environments, leading to decreased engagement and participation in workplaces, classrooms, or social settings.

Stereotype threat: Awareness of negative stereotypes about one's group, often reinforced through microaggressions, and can create anxiety that impairs performance in relevant areas.

Cognitive burden: Individuals must constantly decide whether to address microaggressions, which creates an additional mental load not experienced by members of non-marginalised groups.

Addressing Implicit Bias and Microaggressions

Efforts to address these phenomena can occur at individual and institutional levels:

Individual Approaches

Self-awareness: Tools like the Implicit Association Test (IAT) can help individuals recognise their own implicit biases, though awareness alone is insufficient for change.

Perspective-taking and empathy: Actively considering experiences from others' viewpoints can help reduce bias and increase sensitivity to potentially harmful comments or behaviours.

Conscious counter-stereotyping: Deliberately exposing oneself to counter-stereotypical examples (e.g., through diverse media consumption) can gradually modify implicit associations.

Practicing mindful communication: Slowing down to consider the potential impact of words and actions, especially in cross-cultural or cross-identity interactions.

Organisational and Institutional Approaches

Education and training: While single workshops show limited effectiveness, ongoing, evidence-based training programs can help reduce bias and microaggressions in workplaces and educational settings.

Policy development: Creating clear policies that address discriminatory behaviour and establish procedures for addressing microaggressions when they occur.

Structural changes: Modifying systems and processes to reduce opportunities for bias to affect outcomes (e.g., blinded review processes, structured interview protocols).

Representation and diversity: Increasing diversity at all levels of organisations helps challenge stereotypes through positive contact and exposure to counter-stereotypical examples.

Accountability mechanisms: Creating systems to monitor and hold individuals and institutions accountable to reduce biased patterns in their outcomes.

Challenges and Controversies

Conversations on implicit bias and microaggressions can be quite controversial at times.

Some measures of implicit bias, such as the IAT, are also questioned by critics regarding their ability to predict actual acts of discrimination, particularly in terms of who can be asked to complete them and how reliable and valid they are.

Meanwhile, others believe that complaining about microaggressions makes some hypersensitive or at least hinders free expression, but proponents argue that it merely makes us more conscious of how we communicate.

There are also debates on the most effective way of intervention; some evidence indicates that rigorous mandates or approaches that elicit shame can backfire rather than yield unbiased results.

Conclusion

Implicit bias, along with microaggressions, serves as an internal process that helps establish inclusive environments for all individuals. These occurrences are seldom visible to people who are not personally affected by them, but their impact on those who are proves to be accurate and extensive.

Such phenomena require sustained commitment from the individual and institutional levels. It is something that requires a willingness to engage in uncomfortable work for self-reflection, an openness to feedback, and a striving to create systems that promote equality in general. The work is challenging, but the research has evolved to develop more effective methods for reducing bias and creating more inclusive environments across all areas of society.

Understanding the nature of implicit bias and microaggressions enables us to self-reflect on our potential contributions to inequality and better create truly inclusive communities, workplaces, and institutions.