Beyond Bigotry: Teaching about Unconscious Prejudice

Researchers have demonstrated that unconscious prejudices around characteristics such as race, gender, and class are common, even among people who avow themselves unbiased. The authors present a method for teaching about implicit racial bias using online Implicit Association Tests. The authors do not claim that their method rids students of biases. Instead, the authors show that this approach helps students recognize that they and many other people may hold implicit biases that can affect perceptions and actions and realize that prejudice is not reducible to overt bigotry. The authors also show that the exercise helped some students recognize that talking about race and challenging unconscious associations are better methods of combating prejudice than simply pretending not to notice race. Qualitative and quantitative data reveal that the approach described here was effective in building students’ understanding of unconscious prejudice