Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Stanford psychology professor and MacArthur fellow Eberhardt tackles the difficult subject of racial bias and how it affects our everyday interactions in this enlightening and essential exploration. Drawing from her own experiences and those of her family as well as her work consulting with the Oakland police department, Eberhardt elucidates the ways long-held associations between Black men and criminality have led to prejudices both subtle and overt when it comes to eyewitness descriptions, pursuing suspects, and the split-second assessment of an action as threatening or not. She points out glaring discrepancies in the ways white candidates are favored over people of color with the same qualifications for everything from job applications to Airbnb rentals. And she limns her own experiences, from her young sons' eye-opening comments that reveal their internalized reactions to societal biases to her harrowing arrest the day before she received her PhD after being pulled over by an overzealous cop. Though there's no easy answer, Eberhardt posits the key to change is confronting bias head-on rather than trying to pretend it doesn't exist, and to question and challenge our own snap judgments and their sources. This is a seminal work on a topic that necessitates wide and frank discussion. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.
BookPage Reviews
First steps in confronting our prejudices
Of the many issues that define the social and political landscape of 21st-century America, none is more vexing than that of race.
Though race penetrates the consciousness of many white Americans only in times of crisis (like Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 or Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017), it cuts deeply across the daily lives of African-Americans and other people of color. Stanford University social psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt's enlightening new book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do, is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the challenging and painful interactions that surround issues of prejudice and racial bias.
In a call to her home in Palo Alto, California, Dr. Eberhardt eagerly explains her desire to write about racial bias for the general reader. After winning a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" in 2014 for her work in this field, she felt the weight of added responsibility. She says she wanted "to share my work in a way that could be useful to people and could potentially have an impact with a broader audience."
Motivated by the fact that "there weren't a lot of books out there that focused on the science behind implicit bias," Eberhardt sought to produce a work that would treat this subject in a comprehensive fashion. "I wanted to take this one aspect of bias and look at how we're grappling with it in different spaces—in neighborhoods, in schools, in the workplace and in the criminal justice system," she says, "to really give people a view of how it shows up and how it can affect them in all these different ways."
Asked to define implicit bias, Eberhardt offers a succinct explanation: "the beliefs and the attitudes that we have about social groups that can be triggered unconsciously, or without our awareness, and that can go on to affect our decision-making and our behavior."
Biased features an assortment of troubling studies through which Eberhardt shows how these attitudes—unexpressed and typically deeply suppressed—can be responsible for almost instantaneous, and often invidious, judgments. Results of one study reveal that job applicants with black-sounding names are 50 percent less likely to get a callback than their white counterparts, and another shows that people primed with photographs of African-American men will more quickly identify disguised photographs of guns and knives.
Eberhardt's perspective on the subject of implicit bias has been strongly influenced by her work with the Oakland, California, police department. In 2014, she was appointed to a federal oversight team to monitor Oakland's policing after a settlement of litigation that alleged a pattern of racist misconduct within the department. Through training programs developed by Eberhardt and her team, she has helped Oakland's officers become more conscious of the triggers, fueled by unconscious bias, that can arise during traffic stops and other encounters with African--American residents of the city, before they lead to catastrophic violence.
But Eberhardt has also been gratified by her work outside the context of law -enforcement. Two examples of her constructive consultations with well-known businesses include the neighborhood social network Nextdoor and the home-sharing service Airbnb. Both online platforms became concerned about racial bias among their users, with the former experiencing a high percentage of "crime and safety" posts with racist overtones, and the latter encountering serious evidence of discrimination in its rental process. Eberhardt's discussions with management, she says, enabled businesses to "actually engage with the research and solve a problem."
Biased is also enriched by Eberhardt's candor in drawing on her own experiences as a black woman and mother of three sons. Among the most vivid of these stories is her account of moving to a nearly all-white suburb of Cleveland at age 12, in which she highlights the difficulty she encountered when she was "confronted with a mass of white faces that I could not distinguish from one another" (a phenomenon known as the "other-race effect"), and the disturbing story of her baseless arrest during a traffic stop the day before she was scheduled to receive her Ph.D. in 1993.
While Eberhardt is a strong advocate of training to raise awareness and begin the process of changing behavior influenced by implicit bias, she acknowledges that some of the enthusiasm for that proposed remedy "has really taken off before people have had the opportunity to evaluate what works and what doesn't work so well." She cautions that those involved in providing training may be motivated by their own bias to report favorable outcomes.
Even as she recognizes that it's more realistic to manage implicit bias than to erase it, Eberhardt concludes the conversation on an optimistic note: "In addition to people taking away a good understanding of racial bias—how it works and how it is studied—I would like them to take away hope. Hope that we can do better and be better. In fact, one of the key ingredients to addressing racial bias, as it turns out, is a belief that change is possible. In simply writing the book and talking to people in different environments—from schools to courtrooms, from prisons to workplaces—I found myself changed and inspired."
Copyright 2019 BookPage Reviews.Kirkus Reviews
An internationally renowned expert on implicit racial bias breaks down the science behind our prejudices and their influence in nearly all areas of society and culture.MacArthur Fellow Eberhardt (Psychology/Stanford Univ.; co-editor: Confronting Racism, 1998) challenges the idea that addressing bias is merely a personal choice. Rather, "it is a social agenda, a moral stance." Relying on her neuroscientific research, consulting work, and personal anecdotes, the author astutely examines how stereotypes influence our perceptions, thoughts, and actions. Stereotypes, such as "the association of black people and crime," are shaped by media, history, culture, and our families. A leader in the law enforcement training movement, Eberhardt recounts high-profile cases of police shooting unarmed black people, and she documents her own fears as a mother of three black sons. Though "more than 99 percent of police contacts happen with no police use of force at all," black people are stopped by police disproportionately and are more likely to suffer physical violence. Only a tiny fraction of officers involved in questionable shootings are prosecuted, and convictions are rare. Through her work, the author teaches officers to understand how their biases inform their interactions with the communities they are charged with protecting and serving. She shares informative case studies from her work with Airbnb and Nextdoor, an online information-sharing platform for neighbors, when bias among the sites' users led to racial profiling and discrimination. Eberhardt also looks at bias in the criminal justice system, education, housing and immigration, and the workplace. A chapter on her visit to the University of Virginia after the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville is, much like the book as a whole, simultaneously scholarly illuminating, and heartbreaking. Throughout, Eberhardt makes it clear that diversity is not enough. Only through the hard work of recogn i zing our biases and controlling them can we "free ourselves from the tight grip of history." Compelling and provocative, this is a game-changing book about how unconscious racial bias impacts our society and what each of us can do about it. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
An expert in the issue of unconscious racial bias, Stanford psychology professor and MacArthur Fellow Eberhardt argues that even those who don't believe they are biased and who strive to treat others equally can still harbor bred-in-the-bone stereotypes. To make her case, she draws on both research—in the lab as well as police departments, courtrooms, prisons, and boardrooms and on the street—and personal experience, showing that bias isn't restricted to a few screechy outliers but can affect us all. And it can be fixed by all of us together.
Copyright 2018 Library Journal.Library Journal Reviews
Eberhardt (psychology, Stanford Univ.) helps readers understand how human brains have evolved to fear "the other" and how to combat innate bias once we recognize it. The author uses current research and personal experiences to explain that humans do have trouble distinguishing faces of races other than their own. This categorizing feature of our brains evolved to help us more quickly make sense of the overload of sensory information in our world, however it can lead to bias. Recounting her own traffic stop and consequent arrest on the day before her graduation with her PhD from Harvard, Eberhardt illustrates how prejudice can spin out of control. While this work primarily examines racial bias, Eberhardt touches on gender bias as well and notes how it's transmitted even to very young children. Eberhardt fights bias in the criminal justice system by working with the Oakland police department and teaching at San Quentin prison. She advises that readers combat implicit bias in their lives by slowing down, resisting subjective standards, holding themselves accountable, and raising the standards of their own behavior.
PW Annex Reviews
In this eye-opening explanation of implicit racial bias, Eberhardt, a MacArthur Fellow and social psychologist at Stanford University, melds laboratory research and personal experience, recounting how she came to understand how the way humans process information impacts the lives of those around them. She lays out psychological research proving that racial bias is wired into human brains; her group's "was the first neuroimaging study to demonstrate that there is a neural component to the same-race advantage" in facial recognition—the increased ability to distinguish among and recognize people's faces when they are the same race as the person seeing them (which she also recounts experiencing herself after moving from a majority-black to a majority-white neighborhood as a teen). She also looks at systemic manifestations of bias, such as residential segregation and discrimination in education. In a look at the human impact of bias, Eberhardt explains the bias behind each step in the decision of an Oklahoma police officer in 2016 to shoot Terence Crutcher, a black man whose car had stalled, and interviews his sister about the tragedy of losing a family member under such circumstances. Though there's a section titled "The Way Out," Eberhardt doesn't offer many concrete suggestions for solutions, making the book feel like it overpromises on that element. But Eberhardt's combination of smartly chosen stories and impressively accessible research makes this essential reading for psychology aficionados and people invested in social justice.