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Hawaiian Conference Series 2016
Hawaii Convention Center, Honolulu, Hawaii
The International Academic Forum
iafor
The IAFOR International Conference on Eduaction - Hawaii 2016
Official Conference Proceedings
ISSN: 2189-1036
© The International Academic Forum 2016
The International Academic Forum (IAFOR)
Sakae 1-16-26-201
Naka Ward, Nagoya, Aichi
Japan 460-0008
ww.iafor.org
Can you be Prejudiced Against your own Students? Teacher’s Unconscious Bias in the
Classroom
Ali H. Al-Hoorie, Nottingham University, UK
Jubail Industrial College, KSA
The IAFOR International Conference on Education - Hawaii 2016
Official Conference Proceedings
Keywords: implicit attitudes, prejudice, Implicit Association Test, unconscious motivation
iafor
The International Academic Forum
www.iafor.org
The IAFOR International Conference on Education - Hawaii 2016
Official Conference Proceedings
1
Most teachers would like to be neutral and treat their students fairly. However, as the saying
goes, easier said than done. Psychological research shows that what people intend to do
constitutes the conscious level, while the unconscious level can operate without the
person’s permission or even awareness. For example, a person might declare that males
and females are equal in their intellectual abilities, but in actual behavior that person might
prefer to work with a male partner in a challenging task. This might imply that the
individual has an unconscious bias toward males in terms of intellectual ability. This is an
example of a situation in which ideals are not borne out in actual reality.
Psychologists have examined this conscious–unconscious dissociation. At the extreme
level, it has been described as “a split in consciousness, such as mutually unaware person
systems occupying the same brain” (Greenwald & Nosek, 2009, p. 65). Researchers have
found that this dissociation occurs in many contexts. This is how the typical experiment is
done. The participant is first given a questionnaire to solicit their preferences, e.g. male vs.
females or White vs. Black. Most people state that they are neutral and that these categories
do not matter to them. This constitutes the conscious level. Afterward, the participant is
asked to complete a psychological test of their unconscious attitudes such as the Implicit
Association Test (IAT, Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). This test will give the
participant a score, which may or may not be equivalent to that from the questionnaire. In
the last phase of experiment, the participant is asked to engage in a task. The behavior in
this task is analyzed by the researchers in order to determine whether it shows any signs of
bias, and whether it is better predicted by the conscious or the unconscious measures.
An experiment by Glaser and Knowles (2008) illustrates this idea well. The researchers
used ‘the shooter task’, which was originally developed by Correll, Park, Judd, and
Wittenbrink (2002). In this task, the participant sees a series of pictures of individuals on a
computer screen. They are required to ‘shoot’ criminals that are holding hostile objections
(e.g., a gun or a knife) and refrain from shooting civilians that are holding benign objects
(e.g., a flashlight or a camera). The individuals shown in the picture are White or Black
people, and the task requires the participant to respond as fast as possible. Obviously, the
skin color of the individual in the pictures should have no effect on the decision to shoot,
because it is a matter of whether the individual is holding a hostile or a benign object.
Surprisingly, the participants whose scores on the implicit test showed that they were biased
against Blacks also tended to misidentify Blacks as criminals and shoot them erroneously.
This study gives a clear example of the effect of implicit biases on spontaneous behavior.
On a more positive note, Glaser and Knowles (2008) also found an interesting result. That
is, the above results were moderated by level of attitudes toward prejudice. More
specifically, those who had a negative attitude toward prejudice were able to neutralize the
effect of their implicit biases on their behavior in the shooter task. These results suggest
that having an implicit bias is not the end of the world, as these biases can be counteracted.
The IAFOR International Conference on Education - Hawaii 2016
Official Conference Proceedings
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References
Correll, J., Park, B., Judd, C. M., & Wittenbrink, B. (2002). The police officer’s dilemma:
using ethnicity to disambiguate potentially threatening individuals. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 83, 1314–1329. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.83.6.1314
Glaser, J., & Knowles, E. D. (2008). Implicit motivation to control prejudice. Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, 44(1), 164–172. doi: 10.1016/j.jesp.2007.01.002
Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual
differences in implicit cognition: The Implicit Association Test. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1464–1480. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.74.6.1464
Greenwald, A. G., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Attitudinal dissociation: What does it mean? In
R. E. Petty, R. H. Fazio, & P. Briñol (Eds.), Attitudes: Insights from the New Implicit
Measures (pp. 65–82). New York: Psychology Press.
hoorie_a@jic.edu.sa
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Official Conference Proceedings
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