In Combating Bias, ‘Sometimes Change Can be Produced by Simply Checking a Box’
Revisiting Social Psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt’s 2019 Interfaith Lecture
Throughout Black History Month, we’re showcasing recent programs from Chautauqua stages and online platforms that have given voice to the Black experience in America. These words and images provide critical context for the important and difficult work — and action — to which this moment calls us, to advance the cause of justice.
For the closing lecture of our 2019 Interfaith Lecture Series, concluding a week themed “Exploring Race, Religion, and Culture,” we were honored to host Stanford professor and social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt for a presentation based on her book Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We See, Think, and Do. The book, released in 2019, has been lauded for not just exposing racial bias at all levels of society but also for offering tools and language to address it.
Eberhardt opened her lecture with a story about a plane ride with her then 5-year-old son. The child pointed out the only other Black passenger, commenting that he looked like his father (he didn’t, Eberhardt clarified), and said, “I hope he doesn’t rob the plane.”
Eberhardt was shocked.
“Why would you say that?” she asked her son. “And he looked at me with this really sad face, and he said: ‘I don’t know why I said that. I don’t know why I was thinking that.’”
This personal experience framed the rest of Eberhardt’s lecture, in which she shared her work and research on three areas of bias in America — bias in the criminal justice system, bias in schools and bias in the workplace — ultimately providing actionable steps for confronting those biases, including the example of her team’s work with the Oakland Police Department. Tactics as simple as requiring officers to pause and ask “Do I have credible information to tie this particular person to a crime?” led to a decrease of 43% in stops of law-abiding African Americans.
“They have to think about and answer that question to make the stop,” Eberhardt said. “So by simply adding that checkbox to the form that officers complete, they slow down, they pause, they think, ‘Why am I considering pulling this person over?’ It pushes them to use evidence of wrongdoing in place of intuition.”
Eberhardt closed her lecture with a story that echoed the one about her son on the plane, illustrating the depth of these systemic issues and the work it will take to effect change on a societal and personal level. Picking up The Chautauquan Daily’s coverage:
Eberhardt recalled a story a black police officer once told her. Working undercover, the officer walked the streets of a city and noticed a figure in the distance, who “didn’t look right.” Though he couldn’t clearly identify the figure, the officer knew he saw a black man, with his same build and height.
“So the officer decided he needed to keep an eye on him,” Eberhardt recalled.
As the officer approached a large office building with glass exterior walls, the man also approached, and as the officer looked closer, he realized the man was inside the building and was looking at him through the glass. Losing sight of the man for a moment, the officer panicked, but then he spotted him again. The officer’s pace quickened; and the man’s pace matched. Then the officer stopped, and so, too, the man stopped. Reflected in the glass, the officer was looking at himself.
“He was looking at his own eyes,” Eberhardt said.
With a humbling sadness, that deep association of black people with criminality touches lives on all possible levels. But, Eberhardt said, reminded of Oakland’s success, “real change is possible in policing.”
“Real change is possible in many settings — sometimes the root of that change is hard and is complicated and expensive, but sometimes change can be produced by simply checking a box,” she said. “I’m hopeful that this Biased book can contribute to shifting the conversations that we’re having about race in this country right now, so that we don’t slip back in time, so that we remain hopeful and faithful — so that we have faith that we, as individuals in our institutions, can actually do better.”
[Full recording of Eberhardt’s Interfaith Lecture on our Online Grounds archive]
