“You unconsciously walk across the street if you see someone”: an affective containment framework for implicit bias sensemaking

ABSTRACT

This study explored the role of affect in U.S. potential white jurors’ experiences with implicit bias and how affect manifests in their sensemaking of jury instructions. Using interviews with 30 potential jurors from a Midwestern state, we found that implicit bias operates as a linguistic alibi that allows people to talk about racism while evading the accountability and intensity of the term. Further, when engaging in the linguistic proxy of implicit bias, participants use amplifying and tempering orientations to navigate affective intensities. These orientations inform how potential white jurors make sense of implicit bias instructions. We propose a framework to explain how people communicatively navigate intense topics that can serve as referent to engage in other affectively unpredictable terrains..

KEYWORDS:

• Implicit bias
• Racism
• Affect
• Sensemaking
• Sense-sharing
• Jury deliberation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr. Benjamin Warner for his generous feedback on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded through the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Research Council grant number URC-21-024.