Implicit Bias as a Cognitive Manifestation of Systemic Racism

Lundberg developed the “bias of crowds” model to make sense of the large body of implicit bias research.17 The basic assumption of the mod- el is that implicit bias scores reflect the accessibility of concepts linked to social group categories. [...] People in Middle America and the South (typically “red states”) are more inclined to be “friendly and conventional,” meaning they are higher in conscien- tiousness, agreeableness, and extraversion, and low in neuroticism and openness.18 Regularities in regional personality structure are thought to be due to regularities in the physical environment, historical events, and cultural norms of the regi. [...] As we would predict from the bias of crowds theory, the relationship between the propor- tion of enslaved populations and implicit bias was mediated by structural inequali- ties like the proportion of Black people and white people in poverty, residential seg- regation, and intergenerational mobility of Black people and white people. [...] The bias of crowds model suggests a recursive process such that inequalities of the past create the conditions for implicit biases to develop; and when they do, implicit biases contribute to the perpetuation of inequalities going forward. [...] He is the author of The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die (2017) and has recently published in such jour- nals as Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology, and Proceedings of the Na- tional Academy of Sciences.