Backlash Against Bias Education: Strategies for Increasing Awareness

Anti-bias interventions and theories of prejudice-regulation share the assumption that increasing awareness of psychological sources of bias is necessary to reduce its negative impact on discriminatory judgments and behavior. For this reason, policy makers, industry leaders, and organizations invest substantial resources to educate people on the science of implicit bias and its consequences. However, people are often distressed by information that challenges their self-image, and so many respond defensively to evidence of implicit bias. Across 5 independent samples and 3 experimental paradigms (N > 3500), we test the effectiveness of a novel strategy for reducing defensive responding to implicit bias feedback and, as a result, increasing bias awareness, by leveraging motivations for cognitive consistency. We find that by asking people to evaluate the validity of a measure of implicit attitudes before receiving unflattering feedback, they may be less defensive and more willing to regard that feedback, once provided, as credible. These pre-feedback commitments impose rational constraints and powerful psychological motivations that hinders the ability to ignore or dismiss evidence of bias. By promoting more favorable test attitudes and acceptance of test results in a socially sensitive domain, the intervention increased bias awareness and support for diversity and for actions to combat bias. Thus, learning that one may harbor bias towards members of disadvantaged groups is a necessary (but insufficient) step towards prejudice- regulation; strategies that can help manage the extent to which learning about bias is aversive and stigmatizing will likely bear fruit for bias education and diversity science.