Over the past two years, the global pandemic and protests for racial and social justice have shone new light on disparities in health and other aspects of life for historically marginalized populations. in a variety of fields called out , leading in some cases to additional funding and research of the problem.

In parallel scientific work, , emeritus professor of psychology at the 91探花, joined with five colleagues at other universities to understand effects of bias in all types of organizations, reviewing their own research along with that of many others. They determined that public health strategies can be a model for strategies that could effectively address unintended discrimination.

Their , published May 19 in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, calls on decision-makers to reexamine and retool their organizations to remedy the profound effects of unintended bias.

Greenwald, who created the nearly 25 years ago, makes clear the distinction between bias and racism. Although both produce discrimination, he distinguishes racism, which is intentional bias motivated by hostility, from both implicit bias and systemic bias, which can produce discriminatory outcomes in the absence of hostility and intent.

鈥淒amages due to implicit and systemic bias contribute significantly to contemporary social injustices without intention to discriminate and can do so without perpetrators鈥� awareness of the harms they are causing,鈥� Greenwald said. 鈥淭he personnel in workplaces and government institutions who carry out systemic biases may themselves have no intent to discriminate, and can also be unaware that their actions contribute to discriminatory outcomes.鈥�

Greenwald addressed the issues raised in the new article for 91探花News.

Why do you recommend that discriminatory bias be treated as a public health problem?

Implicit and systemic biases are not illnesses. They are acquired as part of normal development. At the same time, implicit and systemic biases produce disparities in health status and in health care of those who are victimized by these biases. The main reason for considering it wise to treat implicit and systemic biases as public health problems is the likelihood that adaptations of well-known public health strategies can succeed in controlling them where widely used psychologically based efforts have not succeeded.

What about existing efforts to address unintended discrimination?

Two types of possible remedies have received the greatest attention in the past 20 years: mental debiasing, which has been a focus of many laboratory investigations by psychologists; and group-administered training, which has been adopted in many workplaces, where it may be called implicit bias training, anti-racism training, cultural competence training, or diversity training.听 Unfortunately, neither mental debiasing nor group-administered training has been found reliably effective either in reducing biases or improving diversity within organizations.

However, it is premature to believe either that future efforts with these methods can succeed or that such future efforts are doomed to failure.

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Which public health strategies could be successful here?

Many public health strategies are preventive. For discriminatory biases, effective prevention depends on requiring important decisions to be made without knowledge of demographic characteristics of those who are affected by those decisions. This is called decision blinding, and there are many presently unused opportunities to implement it.

Implicit biases are acquired as part of normal development. Systemic biases arise in normal organizational and political process. Nevertheless, where psychologically-based methods have not succeeded, methods that have served effectively to manage public health problems can provide models for effective management of both implicit and systemic bias.

A widely usable method is a medical epidemiological approach called disparity finding. This requires analysis of existing data to identify demographic inequities. Unlike the presently unsuccessful methods of mental debiasing and group-administered training, both prevention and disparity finding depend on modifying decision-making procedures that otherwise can cause unintended discrimination.

Discuss the importance of the organizational 鈥渟elf-test,鈥� which you and your co-authors offer at the end of your article.听

To reduce discrimination, business and political leaders must understand that it is in their power to implement effective fixes. We provide an organizational self-test that can be the starting point for their efforts. That test includes questions that aim to get at what an organization can and is prepared to do, such as obtaining data on how employees and others who receive their services are being treated, and whether there is someone in a leadership role who is responsible for diversity, equity and inclusion activities. Organizations that take these steps can start to repair unintended discrimination.

For more information, contact Greenwald at agg@uw.edu.

When Tony Greenwald and his colleagues developed the online Implicit Association Test two decades ago, it enjoyed quick success in the pre-laptop, pre-smartphone, nascent Internet world, with some 45,000 participants in the first month.

The test, which requires classifying words and images rapidly according to their meanings, captures unconscious biases toward 鈥� depending on the test version 鈥� race, gender, age and dozens of other traits and preferences. Since its debut in 1998, the test has been taken online more than 25 million times and has been used in over 2,000 peer-reviewed research articles. Its concepts have been the subject of classroom and workplace debates, policies and programs.

Now its creators for their contributions to science and society. , a 91探花 professor of psychology, along with of Harvard University and of the University of Virginia, will receive the from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The award honors federally funded work that, in the words of AAAS, 鈥渕ay have been considered silly, odd or obscure when first conducted but has resulted in significant benefits to society.鈥� The award was established in 2012 to counter criticisms of wasteful government spending, such as the late U.S. Sen. William Proxmire鈥檚 .

鈥淥ur work has had much more impact than any scientist has reason to expect for their efforts,鈥� Greenwald said. 鈥淲e have been blessed by the attention we got both inside the profession of psychology and outside.鈥�

For Greenwald, who joined the 91探花faculty in 1986, the award is a recognition of work that started 30 years ago at the UW, as he and colleagues developed the field of implicit social cognition. Creating the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, 听and placing it online gained it instant attention, he said. But as federal agencies shifted their funding emphasis to applied rather than basic research about 10 years later, the test eventually lost its federal sources of research support.

鈥淎s it turned out, the judgment that our research lacked practical application was totally wrong,鈥� Greenwald said.

He points to the myriad uses not only of the online tests 鈥� now supported by the nonprofit , which the researchers established in 2005 鈥� but also of the very idea of implicit bias and how it makes its way into our everyday decisions and behaviors. Unconscious beliefs, stemming from childhood, can influence how teachers evaluate students, how employers hire job candidates or promote workers, how police officers treat suspects and how judges mete out punishment. In many cases, data demonstrate those influences, as with bias in the courtroom: Bail for Black or Hispanic people is often set higher than for White people for the same offenses.

Greenwald points out that many corporations, schools and other organizations provide presentations, workshops and lessons in recognizing and combating bias. But the science needs more development before these efforts will become effective.

A reliable finding: Most of those who take the test have a moderate-to-strong preference for racially White people over racially Black people, except for African Americans, whose results are distributed widely from White preference to Black preference. Another: People of all ages favor young over old.

Giving in to implicit bias is like 鈥渂eing the carrier of a disease you don鈥檛 know you have,鈥� Greenwald said. Learning that you have it is not enough to prevent its spread.

鈥淔or some people it鈥檚 totally easy to accept that there are things in their head that they don鈥檛 want to be there,鈥� he said. 鈥淎 leader needs to know that implicit bias can afflict an organization鈥檚 decision makers, and that there are policies that will avoid those undesired effects. A leader needs to examine the organization, determine where the disparities are occurring, and have the fortitude to implement policies that will fix the problem.鈥�

There are methods of evaluating employees and colleagues that can reduce the influence of unconscious bias: the blind audition in music, for instance, in which a performer plays behind a screen; or with job candidates, pre-determining the criteria used for evaluation.

Greenwald hopes that scientists can soon come together to take a position, not unlike that for climate change, on the importance of implicit bias and how to address its consequences.

鈥淚n a way, it鈥檚 surprising that we鈥檙e talking about the IAT being 20 years old,鈥� Greenwald said. 鈥淥ne expects a method like this to be replaced before long by a superior method. I was among many who have tried to improve on the IAT, but no one has yet succeeded.鈥�

Greenwald, Banaji and Nosek will be honored in a ceremony Sept. 13 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

By age 5 children have a sense of self-esteem comparable in strength to that of adults, according to a new study by 91探花 researchers.

Because self-esteem tends to remain relatively stable across one’s lifespan, the study suggests that this important personality trait is already in place before children begin kindergarten.

“Our work provides the earliest glimpse to date of how preschoolers sense their selves,” said lead author , a research scientist at the UW’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences (I-LABS).

“We found that as young as 5 years of age self-esteem is established strongly enough to be measured,” said Cvencek, “and we can measure it using sensitive techniques.”

The , published in the January 2016 issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, used a newly developed test to assess implicit self-esteem in more than 200 5-year-old children 鈥� the youngest age yet to be measured.

“Some scientists consider preschoolers too young to have developed a positive or negative sense about themselves. Our findings suggest that self-esteem, feeling good or bad about yourself, is fundamental,” said co-author, , co-director of I-LABS. “It is a social mindset children bring to school with them, not something they develop in school.”

Meltzoff continued: “What aspects of parent-child interaction promote and nurture preschool self-esteem? That’s the essential question. We hope we can find out by studying even younger children.”

Until now no measurement tool has been able to detect self-esteem in preschool-aged children. This is because existing self-esteem tests require the cognitive or verbal sophistication to talk about a concept like “self” when asked probing questions by adult experimenters.

“Preschoolers can give verbal reports of what they’re good at as long as it is about a narrow, concrete skill, such as ‘I’m good at running’ or ‘I’m good with letters,’ but they have difficulties providing reliable verbal answers to questions about whether they are a good or bad person,” Cvencek said.

To try a different approach, Cvencek, Meltzoff and co-author created a self-esteem task for preschoolers. Called the Preschool Implicit Association Test (PSIAT), it measures how strongly children feel positively about themselves.

Adult versions of the IAT, which was first developed by Greenwald, can reveal attitudes and beliefs that people don’t know they have, such as biases related to race, gender, age and other topics.

“Previously we understood that preschoolers knew about some of their specific good features. We now understand that, in addition, they have a global, overall knowledge of their goodness as a person,” said Greenwald.

The task for adults works by measuring how quickly people respond to words in different categories. For instance, the adult implicit self-esteem task measures associations between words like “self” and “pleasant” or “other” and “unpleasant.”

To make the task appropriate for preschoolers who can’t read, the researchers replaced words related to the self (“me,” “not me”) with objects. They used small unfamiliar flags, and the children were told which of the flags were “yours” and “not yours.”

The 5-year-olds in the experiment鈥攚hich included an even mix of 234 boys and girls from the Seattle area鈥攆irst learned to distinguish their set of flags (“me”) from another set of flags (“not me”).

Using buttons on a computer, they responded to a series of “me” and “not me” flags and to a series of “good” words from a loudspeaker (fun, happy, good, nice) and “bad” words (bad, mad, mean, yucky). Then, to measure self-esteem, the children had to combine the words and press the buttons to indicate whether the “good” words were associated more with the “me” flags or not.

The results showed that the 5-year-olds associated themselves more with “good” than with “bad,” and this was equally pronounced in both girls and boys.

The researchers also did two more implicit tests to probe different aspects of the self. A gender identity task assessed the children’s sense of whether they are a boy or a girl, and a gender attitude task measured the children’s preference for other children of their own gender, called a “gender in-group preference.”

Children who had high self-esteem and strong own-gender identity also showed stronger preferences for members of their own gender.

Taken together, the findings show that self-esteem is not only unexpectedly strong in children this young, but is also systematically related to other fundamental parts of children鈥檚 personality, such as in-group preferences and gender identity.

“Self-esteem appears to play a critical role in how children form various social identities. Our findings underscore the importance of the first five years as a foundation for life,” Cvencek said.

The researchers are following up with the children in the study to examine whether self-esteem measured in preschool can predict outcomes later in childhood, such as health and success in school. They are also interested in the malleability of children’s self-esteem and how it changes with experience.

Grants from the UW’s Ready Mind Project, and the Implicit Cognition Research Fund supported the research.

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For more information, contact Cvencek at 206-543-8029 or听dario1@uw.edu, Greenwald at 206-543-7227 or agg@uw.edu, Meltzoff at 206-685-2045 or听meltzoff@uw.edu. Image available of the apparatus used in the experiment.

“We can produce discrimination without having any intent to discriminate or any dislike for those who end up being disadvantaged by our behavior,” said 91探花 psychologist , who co-authored the review with of the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Greenwald and Pettigrew reviewed experiments and survey methods from published scientific research on discrimination from the last five decades. They were surprised to find that the discrimination observed in those studies occurred much more often as helping rather than harming someone. But they also found that most researchers defined discrimination as based on negative attitudes and hostility, only rarely treating favoritism as a component of discrimination.

That makes sense, Greenwald said, because most people think of discrimination as the result of hostility: a white person spouting anti-black rhetoric, or a homophobe yelling slurs at a gay couple. But, he argues, it’s more subtle acts, ones people don’t even recognize as causing disadvantage to anyone, that are likely to be much more significant.

Take this hypothetical scenario: When conducting reviews of two employees, a manager finds they both fall between two performance categories. The manager gives a higher category to the employee whose child is friends with the manager’s child, leading to a promotion and salary raise, while the other employee receives a smaller raise and no promotion.

Was the manager consciously discriminating against the second employee? Or did she simply give a boost to someone to whom she had an “ingroup” connection?

“Your ‘ingroup’ involves people that you feel comfortable with, people you identify with,” Greenwald explained. “We usually think first of demographic characteristics like age, race, sex, religion and ethnicity as establishing an ingroup, but there are also ingroups based on occupation, neighborhood and schools attended, among other things. Outgroups are those with whom you don’t identify.”

Greenwald and Pettigrew propose that unequal treatment in the form of doing favors for those like you, rather than inflicting harm on those unlike you, causes the majority of discrimination in the U.S.

“This is not to say that prejudice and hostility are not related to outgroup discrimination,” Pettigrew said. “But they are not as central to most discrimination as ingroup favoritism.”

Yet, historically, social scientists have emphasized prejudicial hostility as the root of discrimination.

“We looked at how prejudice has been defined in the history of psychology. It has generally been understood as hostility toward outgroups. That’s easy to do, because inter-group conflict is an obvious fact of life,” Greenwald said. “There are international conflicts, wars, gang battles, labor-management conflicts. When such conflicts are going on it’s natural to think of them as rooted in hostility.”

Greenwald hopes researchers will change how they study discrimination, because research results have substantial implications both for how discrimination is identified and how it can be ameliorated in employment, health care, education and daily life.

He said overt acts of discrimination began to decline starting in the 1960s following civil rights laws. But prejudicial attitudes didn’t necessarily change. What changed is that people were no longer legally allowed to act on their prejudices by, for example, denying housing to blacks or jobs to women.

The co-authors say that racial ingroup favoritism can be very subtle. For instance, if you work in an office that is mostly white and you’re asked to recommend someone for a job opening, you’re more likely to recommend someone who is like you and the rest of your ingroup.

This sort of ingroup favoritism happens at all ages and in different situations. Greenwald said it can happen on the playground, where children may exhibit ingroup favoritism based on race, economic class, or the same school or sports team.

“Hostility isn’t integral to the definition of discrimination; you can treat people differently without being hostile to anyone,” Greenwald said. “But it is societally important to understand how discrimination can occur both without hostility and without any intent to discriminate.”

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For more information, contact Greenwald at agg@uw.edu or 206-543-7227, or Pettigrew at pettigr@ucsc.edu or 831-425-4777.

Note to media: For a PDF of the American Psychologist article, please contact Doree Armstrong, 91探花News Office, at doreea@uw.edu or 206-543-2580.

91探花 psychologist has developed a new version of his to measure the strength of one’s support for one of several football teams. Greenwald created the original Implicit Association Test in 1998 to gauge a person’s unconscious beliefs and hidden biases. He and colleagues have since adapted it for numerous scenarios, including racial attitudes during the 2012 presidential election.

Greenwald developed the current football test with psychologist Colin Smith at the University of Florida. It is designed for fans of the four teams that played in the NFC and AFC conference championships: Seattle Seahawks, Denver Broncos, New England Patriots and San Francisco 49ers. The 10-minute asks participants to respond quickly to images and words on the screen. The images are versions of each team’s logo or name, and the words include self-identifiers such as “mine” and “theirs.” Fans can take three different tests: Seattle-San Francisco, New England-Denver and Seattle-Denver.

Greenwald said the psychological theory known as “” claims that support for a team rises after a win and drops after a loss, so he encourages Seattle and Denver fans to take the test before the Super Bowl and again afterward to see if there is any difference in their support for a certain team. Fans can take the test as many times as they want.

“I think on average the reflected glory theory is probably right, but I don’t think that applies to everyone,” Greenwald said. “I do think the strong fan is someone whose attachment is pretty unshakable. It’s really a test of your strength as a fan that if you still show a strong association after the team has lost, then you are a real fan.”

Greenwald says he is sometimes surprised by unexpected results from variations of the test. But when he took the Seattle-Denver test, he wasn’t surprised to learn that he had a strong identification with Seattle.

“For sports teams, the test mostly produces results that people agree reflects them,” he said. “For me, it could also be tapping into my generally positive associations with Seattle, apart from the team. But that sense of identity can fluctuate. Someone who’s more of a fair-weather fan of a team may show weaker support for the team on this test after a loss.”

Thousands of adaptations of the online Implicit Association Test have been taken by people more than 15 million times in the last 15 years, measuring unconscious attitudes about race, gender, sexuality, ethnicities and other topics.

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For more information, contact Greenwald at agg@uw.edu or 206-543-7227.