Facial Bias and Attenuation Proposals
By: Griffin McDaniel
Socrates was convicted of corrupting the youth and was furthermore sentenced to death via hemlock in 399 B.C.. However, it is questionable if he was indeed beguiling the youth of Athens’ and why his retribution was so harsh. Was this due to the nepotism of the state or perhaps because Socrates’ face wasn’t deemed to be genuine? We cannot make any conclusions with certainty regarding this occurrence, but there exists a chance that facial bias influenced the ruling of the jury in this case. Facial bias is one’s tendency to make attributions about the intangible characteristics of another from their facial features and use those conclusions to make future decisions.
Although it may seem foolish, us rational actors allow this implicit bias to frequently impact our decisions. A surfeit of research has supported the prevalence of facial bias in numerous avenues, such as political elections and military rank attainment (Olivola et al., 2014). Additionally, the idea proposing that the context in which a decision is presented determines the attributions we make about a person’s face has also been supported (Olivola et al., 2014). For instance, we may seek a politician who appears to be more competent or deem an individual to be intelligent merely because they look the part. Correlational studies suggest those who appear to be a quintessential miscreant are more likely to be convicted in court (Olivola et al, 2014). We may merely ponder the number of individuals unjustly condemned or acquitted due to facial bias. It is quite disconcerting to think of the innocent paying recompense for their inherent features. These findings exhibit the pervasiveness of facial bias and its unfortunate effects on the decisions we make within our environment. Since this bias sustains a substantial presence within our recurrent decision-making process and affects the lives of other persons, it behooves us to attenuate this flawed device.
Primarily, it may be conducive to the mitigation process if one is aware of facial bias and, since you’re currently reading this, you may be progressing already. Moreover, data supports that individuals often rely on this implicit mechanism when they lack information regarding the topic on which a decision will be made (Olivola et al., 2014). Thus, it is recommended that one collects any pertinent intelligence before succumbing to facial bias. A multi-study sequence examining bias mitigation and disparate bias training techniques discovered that those who spent 60 minutes training made fewer biased conclusions compared to those who spent 30 minutes training, regardless of training type (Bessarabova et al., 2016). Additionally, this study suggested the repetition of either hybrid or implicit training diminished the influence of bias on the participant’s decisions. Therefore, if you wish to attenuate the influence of facial bias on your decisions, try partaking in a training technique of your choice for at least 60 minutes on a frequent basis. This endeavor may very well allow you to cast more accurate conclusions and act in a more pragmatic manner.
References
1. Bessarabova, E., Piercy, C. W., King, S., Vincent, C., Dunbar, N. E., Burgoon, J. K., . . . Lee, Y. (2016). Mitigating bias blind spot via a serious video game. Computers in Human Behavior, 62, 452–466. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2016.03.089
2. Olivola, C. Y., Funk, F., & Todorov, A. (2014). Social attributions from faces bias human choices. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(11), 566–570. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2014.09.007
