Two flaws concerning belief accounts of implicit biases

Abstract

The current scientific discourse offers two opposing viewpoints about the roots of implicit biases: are they belief states or subdoxastic attitudes? The goal of this paper is to show that belief accounts of implicit biases are (1) too demanding and (2) lack a satisfying reasoning theory. Firstly, I will outline the concept of attitude and its relation to implicit biases. Next, I will briefly outline Mandelbaum’s view, who gives a paradigmatic example of a belief account of implicit biases. Afterward, I will concern two flaws and discuss them in more detail. This shows that all current belief accounts of implicit biases do not emphasize these critical points enough, which makes them unsatisfying.

Keywords:

• Implicit bias
• implicit attitudes
• beliefs
• implicit association test
• representations
• discrimination

View correction statement:

Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Gottfried Vosgerau, Robert Rupert, Jonathan Koch and Andrew Waldeck-Young for helping me to significantly improve this text. This research was partly financed by the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst).

Notes

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Corrigendum (https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2018.1450133).

1. A meta-study (Gawronski, Hu, Rydell, Vervliet, & De Houwer, 2015) reveals the reliability of the investigated effects in humans, which supports the original findings. Nevertheless, according to the meta-study, the measured effect sizes (for ABA and ABC renewal) were less strong than expected. The weak effect sizes might be in part explained by moderating variables, like attention.

2. Note, I am not giving any kind of definition of (conceptual) representations, but rather give necessary conditions for their ascription—so every really useful definition of (conceptual) representation must at least fulfill these conditions.