Drivers are less likely to brake for black pedestrians, study finds | Toronto Star

2017/03/24 Leave a comment

Interesting and revealing study that is careful to include the needed caveats to its results:

A new study appears to offer additional evidence that drivers are less likely to brake for African-American pedestrians trying to cross the street, a phenomenon known as “walking while black.”

Researchers at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas also found that the disparity is greater depending on whether the pedestrian is in a high- or low-income neighbourhood: the average number of vehicles to pass by a black pedestrian who was already in the crosswalk was at least seven times higher compared with a white pedestrian in the wealthier neighbourhood, the study’s lead researcher said.

“Sadly, it wasn’t surprising,” said Courtney Coughenour, an assistant professor in the School of Community Health Sciences at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

But there are also several factors in the Las Vegas study that suggest the results should be interpreted with care.

In three scenarios that the researchers used, they found little statistically significant data to suggest a difference in the way motorists reacted to the pedestrian, whether black or white. In one of those, in fact, more cars passed the white pedestrian than the black pedestrian when they were waiting to step off the curb in the high-income neighbourhood.

What’s more, the roadways between the high- and low-income neighbourhoods differed in design, both in the number of lanes the pedestrian had to cross and the posted speed limit, as the study acknowledges. The researchers also noted, citing other research, that the disparity between yielding rates in the different neighbourhoods could be explained by several factors, such as people in high-income areas more often having private cars and driving more compared to people in low-income neighbourhoods, where there are also generally more pedestrians.

More than 4,700 pedestrians were killed in traffic crashes in 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, citing the most recent figures available. The Las Vegas study, also citing CDC data, says fatality rates for black and Latino men are more than twice as high as for white men.

The Las Vegas study, which was published online in January in the journal of Accident Analysis and Prevention, involved observing what happens when two female students — one black, one white — cross a street where there is no traffic light.

The experiment was conducted in one neighbourhood located on the west side of Las Vegas where the median household income was $55,994, and in another in the east where the median was $32,884. (Coughenour declined to identify the two neighbourhoods further.)

Both pedestrians in the experiment were students and both were of similar height and build. Each wore similar clothing. They took turns crossing the street about 126 times, or approximately 34 times in the high-income neighbourhood and 30 times in the low-income neighbourhood. (Two crossings were spoiled by observer error.)

The researchers first counted how many cars passed while the pedestrian stood on the curb waiting to cross. After the first car stopped in the nearest lane and the pedestrian stepped into the street, observers continued to count vehicles that failed to stop in the remaining lanes on that half of the street. (The observers did not count traffic moving in the opposite direction on the other half of the roadway.)

What the researchers found was that drivers yielded to the pedestrian waiting at the curb to cross about 52 per cent of the time in the high-income neighbourhood and 71 per cent of the time in the low-income neighbourhood.

After factoring in race, the researchers found little statistical significance in whether drivers yielded for black or white pedestrians waiting at the curb in either neighbourhood — although drivers in the high-income area were less likely to yield for the white pedestrian. (And a higher percentage of drivers in the low-income neighbourhood stopped for the white pedestrian.)

But Coughenour said she was much more troubled by the what happened when the pedestrians stepped off the curb and began walking in the crosswalk — both because of the more dangerous circumstances and because the statistical significance was higher: The average number of drivers who continued moving with a black pedestrian already in the crosswalk was at least seven times higher than for the white pedestrian in the high-income neighbourhood, she said.

Among the several caveats worth noting are these, however:

Nevada law is ambiguous about when drivers are required to stop for pedestrians. Under state law, when there is no traffic light, for example, a driver is obliged to slow and yield the right of way “if need be” when a pedestrian is in the crosswalk on the same half of the highway, the study says. They are also required only to “exercise proper caution” when observing a pedestrian on or near the roadway.

The crosswalk in the high-income neighbourhood was on a street with six lanes and a speed limit of 45 mph (72 km/hr.); the street in the low-income neighbourhood had four lanes with a 35-mph speed limit.

The observers were aware of whether a black student or a white student was crossing. To control for possible observational bias, however, the observers followed a protocol for making observations and counting passing cars, Coughnenour said.

The sample size is relatively small.

Coughenour, while acknowledging the study’s limitations, said she believes the results confirm what researchers found in a study conducted by researchers at Portland State University in Oregon and the University of Arizona. She said the findings are also in line with a large body of literature that suggests people react differently to others based on “implicit bias” that may not be conscious. “We all have some sort of innate bias,” she said.

Source: Drivers are less likely to brake for black pedestrians, study finds | Toronto Star

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We’re All a Little Biased, Even if We Don’t Know It – The New York Times

2016/10/07 Leave a comment

Thanks to the VP debate, implicit bias has become the new political correctness term for the right. Good piece explaining what it is and is not.

As I have argued before, confronting implicit bias means becoming more mindful and aware, rather than just using automatic thinking:

“Senator, please,” Mr. Pence said, addressing his Democratic opponent, Tim Kaine, “enough of this seeking every opportunity to demean law enforcement broadly by making the accusation of implicit bias every time tragedy occurs.”

The concept, in his words, came across as an insult, a put-down on par with branding police as racists. Many Americans may hear it as academic code for “racist.” But that connotation does not line up with scientific research on what implicit bias is and how it really operates.

Researchers in this growing field say it isn’t just white police officers, but all of us, who have biases that are subconscious, hidden even to ourselves.

Implicit bias is the mind’s way of making uncontrolled and automatic associations between two concepts very quickly. In many forms, implicit bias is a healthy human adaptation — it’s among the mental tools that help you mindlessly navigate your commute each morning. It crops up in contexts far beyond policing and race (if you make the rote assumption that fruit stands have fresher produce, that’s implicit bias). But the same process can also take the form of unconsciously associating certain identities, like African-American, with undesirable attributes, like violence.

The science of how this submerged bias affects your actions is still a work in progress; studies have found a link between the biases and specific actions in some situations but not others. But because this bias is a function of universal human psychology, researchers say, we all experience it — and you can’t exactly get “rid” of it.

Well-intentioned people may also hold implicit biases that run counter to their stated values. That’s why it’s hard to square Mr. Pence’s description with the science. To broach implicit bias isn’t to impugn someone’s values; it’s to recognize that our values compete on an unconscious level with all the stereotypes we absorb from the world around us. And even black police officers aren’t immune to internalizing them.

“These types of cultural biases are like smog in the air,” Jennifer Richeson, a Yale psychologist, wrote in an email, citing an analogy often used by a former president of Spelman College, Beverly Daniel Tatum. “To live and grow up in our culture, then, is to ‘take in’ these cultural messages and biases and do so largely unconsciously.”

In the context of race, implicit bias is considered a particularly important idea because it acknowledges forces beyond bigotry that perpetuate inequality. If we talk less about it, as Mr. Pence suggested — this “really has got to stop,” he said Tuesday night — we lose vocabulary that allows us to confront racial disparities without focusing on the character of individual people.

“You’re removing the language that allows you talk about the mechanism of inequality,” said Phillip Atiba Goff, the president of the Center for Policing Equity at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a professor there. “If you take away that language, what that means is inequality gets stronger and justice gets weaker. It really gets that serious.”

Mr. Goff said he hears objections similar to Mr. Pence’s every time he gives presentations or leads training sessions with police departments. “Someone will say, ‘I’m tired of being called a racist,’ ” he said. To which he explains that racism and implicit bias aren’t interchangeable.

“That wrong formulation is so ingrained,” Mr. Goff said. “That’s what’s dangerous. It’s so easy to call it a slight, and if that metastasizes in our political discourse, we really have lost out on an incredible opportunity to take great strides forward.”

He fears that implicit bias could become a political trope, dismissed as an insult and not as science, or worse, tugged into the realm of political correctness. He acknowledges that the left mistreats the topic, too, citing implicit bias as a catchall to explain all the forces of racial unfairness in society that aren’t bigotry.

In fact, implicit bias is just one of many psychological processes that shape how we interact with one another. We also tend to be better at remembering the faces of people in our own racial group, or to subconsciously favor people in our group. The fear of being stereotyped psychologically weighs on people, too. In police training, Mr. Goff has watched officers using other kinds of mental shortcuts in which they assume “active shooters” must be men. He now talks more broadly about “identity traps” that encompass implicit biases and much more.

The challenge, he argues, isn’t to eliminate biases, but to try to interrupt them so we can act more often in ways that line up with our values. Researchers, though, still have a lot to learn about how to do that. And it would be unfortunate, Mr. Goff argued, if implicit bias became politically unmentionable right at the moment when science was trying to uncover the answer.

For now, laboratory simulations don’t easily translate to the real world, and it’s hard to convert beliefs into behaviors. It’s unclear how well nascent police training programs work. And police officers are not the only ones facing implicit-bias training — this fall, the home-sharing company Airbnb announced it planned to offer such a program to its hosts. It’s not clear that will work, either.

Tony Greenwald, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington, said training can even backfire, as a result of another tendency we have: People who attend programs like these may falsely believe they’ve rooted out their biases and so don’t need to worry about them any more.

“Just wanting to eliminate implicit bias is not sufficient,” Mr. Greenwald said. “You can’t unlearn implicit biases. We live in a society and culture where the influences that create these are so strong and pervasive, that we’re not going to get rid of those influences in any short period.”

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Bias Isn’t Just A Police Problem, It’s A Preschool Problem : NPR

2016/09/29 Leave a comment

Worth reading in terms of just how embedded implicit bias is:

New research from the Yale Child Study Center suggests that many preschool teachers look for disruptive behavior in much the same way: in just one place, waiting for it to appear.

The problem with this strategy (besides it being inefficient), is that, because of implicit bias, teachers are spending too much time watching black boys and expecting the worst.

The Study

Lead researcher Walter Gilliam knew that to get an accurate measure of implicit bias among preschool teachers, he couldn’t be fully transparent with his subjects about what, exactly, he was trying to study.

Implicit biases are just that — subtle, often subconscious stereotypes that guide our expectations and interactions with people.

“We all have them,” Gilliam says. “Implicit biases are a natural process by which we take information, and we judge people on the basis of generalizations regarding that information. We all do it.”

Even the most well-meaning teacher can harbor deep-seated biases, whether she knows it or not. So Gilliam and his team devised a remarkable — and remarkably deceptive — experiment.

At a big, annual conference for pre-K teachers, Gilliam and his team recruited 135 educators to watch a few short videos. Here’s what they told them:

“We are interested in learning about how teachers detect challenging behavior in the classroom. Sometimes this involves seeing behavior before it becomes problematic. The video segments you are about to view are of preschoolers engaging in various activities. Some clips may or may not contain challenging behaviors. Your job is to press the enter key on the external keypad every time you see a behavior that could become a potential challenge.”

Each video included four children: a black boy and girl and a white boy and girl.

Here’s the deception: There was no challenging behavior.

While the teachers watched, eye-scan technology measured the trajectory of their gaze. Gilliam wanted to know: When teachers expected bad behavior, who did they watch?

“What we found was exactly what we expected based on the rates at which children are expelled from preschool programs,” Gilliam says. “Teachers looked more at the black children than the white children, and they looked specifically more at the African-American boy.”

Indeed, according to recent data from the U.S. Department of Education, black children are 3.6 times more likely to be suspended from preschool than white children. Put another way, black children account for roughly 19 percent of all preschoolers, but nearly half of preschoolers who get suspended.

One reason that number is so high, Gilliam suggests, is that teachers spend more time focused on their black students, expecting bad behavior. “If you look for something in one place, that’s the only place you can typically find it.”

The Yale team also asked subjects to identify the child they felt required the most attention. Forty-two percent identified the black boy, 34 percent identified the white boy, while 13 percent and 10 percent identified the white and black girls respectively.

The Vignette

The Yale study had two parts. And, as compelling as the eye-scan results were, Gilliam’s most surprising takeaway came later.

He gave teachers a one-paragraph vignette to read, describing a child disrupting a class; there’s hitting, scratching, even toy-throwing. The child in the vignette was randomly assigned what researchers considered a stereotypical name (DeShawn, Latoya, Jake, Emily), and subjects were asked to rate the severity of the behavior on a scale of one to five.

White teachers consistently held black students to a lower standard, rating their behavior as less severe than the same behavior of white students.

Gilliam says this tracks with previous research around how people may shift standards and expectations of others based on stereotypes and implicit bias. In other words, if white teachers believe that black boys are more likely to behave badly, they may be less surprised by that behavior and rate it less severely.

Black teachers, on the other hand, did the opposite, holding black students to a higher standard and rating their behavior as consistently more severe than that of white students.

Here’s another key finding: Some teachers were also given information about the disruptive child’s home life, to see if it made them more empathetic:

[CHILD] lives with his/her mother, his/her 8- and 6-year old sisters, and his/her 10-month-old baby brother. His/her home life is turbulent, between having a father who has never been a constant figure in his/her life, and a mother who struggles with depression but doesn’t have the resources available to seek help. During the rare times when his/her parents are together, loud and sometimes violent disputes occur between them. In order to make ends meet, [CHILD’s] mother has taken on three different jobs, and is in a constant state of exhaustion. [CHILD] and his/her siblings are left in the care of available relatives and neighbors while their mother is at work.

Guess what happened.

Teachers who received this background did react more empathetically, lowering their rating of a behavior’s severity — but only if the teacher and student were of the same race.

Source: Bias Isn’t Just A Police Problem, It’s A Preschool Problem : NPR Ed : NPR

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Reviewers will find more spelling errors in your writing if they think you’re black – Vox

2014/04/23 Leave a comment

While the study is a relatively small sample, and there are a number of methodological flaws, indicated in the article, nevertheless is consistent with some other kinds of tests (e.g., blind cvs) to measure implicit bias.

In an experimental context, when reviewers were told the author of a legal brief was black they consistently rated identical pieces lower in quality and identified more spelling, grammar, factual, or analytical errors. It’s evidence that, even if the days of overt bigotry and explicit discrimination are mostly past, the United States still struggles with a deep problem of implicit racism.

Arin N. Revees, the president of Nextions and the author of the study, argues that the implicit racism happened because reviewers take the racial information she provided as a cue for how they should judge the work. When the author is supposed to be white, reviewers excused errors as out of haste or inexperience. They commented that the author “has potential” and was “generally a good writer but needs to work on” some skills. When the author is supposed to be black, those same errors became evidence of incompetence. A reviewer said he “can’t believe he [the author] went to NYU,” and others said he “needs lots of work” and was “average at best.”

Reviewers will find more spelling errors in your writing if they think you’re black – Vox.

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