Moral Judgments about Implicit Race Bias

I'm a social psychology graduate student working at UNC Chapel-Hill with Dr. Keith Payne, who specializes in unconscious and unintended cognitive processes.  In particular, our lab is interested in implicit race bias, or racial biases that are either outside of awareness or beyond our control.  Because awareness and control are typically considered the two main criteria for the ascription of moral responsibility, such biases present a problem for moral appraisal: do we punish discrimination regardless of the mental states involved, or do we exculpate the agent because he or she lacks awareness and control?  There are no easy answers to this question, and psychologists working in this field are all over the map in terms of the ethical implications of these findings.  Moreover, social psychologists in this field are being brought into courtrooms for disparate treatment cases, suggesting that at least legal conceptions are going to start being influenced by the science.  Yet no one has empirically examined the effects of theories of implicit bias upon people's intuitions about moral responsibility.

We recently collaborated with Joshua Knobe on a project investigating how people attribute moral responsibility for discrimination described in terms of implicit race bias.  Three types of discrimination were presented, in the contexts of promotions, renting, and grading.  In all cases, we presented an agent who endorses egalitarianism.  Yet for some reason or other, the agent fails to live up to these explicit principles, and discriminates.  What changed across conditions were the extra details:

- In the "Unconscious Condition', we suggested that implicit race bias is unconscious.  That is, the agent was unaware of the bias, and it led to discriminatory behavior.  Note that lack of awareness precludes the possibility of control.

- In the 'Automatic Condition', we suggested that the implicit race bias is automatic and uncontrollable.  That is, the agent was aware of the bias, but unable to prevent it from influencing bhavior.

- In the 'Folk Condition', we didn't provide any theory of implicit race bias to explain the discriminatory behavior, implying that the agent is a hypocrite who says one thing and does another.

The unconscious and automatic conditions represent the two prominent theoretical views about implicit race bias.  The design was between-subjects, so that each participant saw a scenario for only the unconscious, automatic, or folk conditions (and for one of the three discrimination contexts, which were there for generality, and no effects were expected across context).  They were then asked four questions about moral responsibility (i.e. 'Is John morally responsible ...', 'Should John be punished...' etc; though conceptually questions of moral responsibility and punishment/blame do come apart, the composite of these items had high reliability so was kept together). 

In the first study, people attributed significantly less moral responsibility in the unconscious condition compared to the other two conditions.  There was no significant difference in responsibility attributions between the automatic and folk conditions.  In a second study, we replicated this basic pattern and also tested for potential mediators.  There were three we had in mind.  First, maybe the lack of awareness implied by unconscious bias also implies lack of intent -- so maybe the agent lacked intent, and that's why she could not be held responsible.  Second, maybe the unconscious bias did not represent the agent's true self -- i.e. the agent could not have possibly endorsed an unconscious bias, so it shouldn't be counted as self-representative or blameworthy.  Third, maybe participants felt less negative emotion toward the agent in the unconscious condition.  It turns out that negative emotion was the only mediator.  In fact, the pattern of means for intent was the exact opposite of the pattern for moral responsibility!  In other words, people attributed the highest intent to discriminate to the agent in the unconscious condition, even though that agent was assigned the lowest moral responsibility; and vice versa for the folk condition. 

In the paper, we draw out potential social and ethical implications as well.  Anyhow, the full details of the paper can be viewed here:

http://www.unc.edu/~dcameron/Moral_Responsibility_3.17.08.pdf

Thanks for letting me post, I'd love to hear any and all feedback you all may have.

-Daryl