How We Are ‘Biased’

Jennifer Eberhardt on the rapid assessments we make about race

Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do is a 2019 book by Stanford University social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt. It addresses our unconscious assumptions about race, particularly those that are detrimental to Black people in the United States.

How do stereotyping and prejudice work? Quickly and effortlessly, with or without justification. Eberhardt writes:

“Take the category ‘apples.’ This category contains our beliefs about how apples grow, where they grow, what varieties exist, what colors they come in, how large they are, what they feel like, what they taste like, when we should eat them, whether we should cook them or eat them raw, how healthy they are for us, and so on. We also may like or dislike apples, depending on our experience with them and what we’ve been told about them. And this feeling, along with the beliefs we have about apples, can dictate whether we will eat an apple that is offered to us, buy an apple in a grocery store, or pick an apple off a tree. Simply seeing one apple can bring to mind the feelings and thoughts associated with the entire category. In fact, the stronger those associations are, the faster those feelings and thoughts are brought to mind.”