Guilty by implicit racial bias: the guilty/not guilty Impicit Association Test

For many legal scholars, startling scientific evidence of implicit racial bias, including the now famous Implicit Association Test (IAT), have revealed a truth about racial discrimination in America that had previously been difficult to prove. Yet despite commentators’ progress in considering how the law should respond to this new evidence of racial bias, two challenges have continued to limit legal scholarship on implicit bias from achieving its full potential. First, empirical social science on implicit bias has rarely focused on the law. For example, prior to the study presented in this article, no IATs had been designed specifically to test law-related hypotheses. And second, legal scholarship on implicit bias has tended to maintain a narrow substantive focus, often considering discrimination in the workplace and in policy-making, but rarely considering racial biases in other areas of law. The question, for example, of whether jury verdicts in criminal trials are tainted by implicit racial biases has yet to be considered adequately.