Long-term reduction in implicit race bias: A prejudice habit-breaking intervention

By Patricia G. Devine, Patrick S. Forscher, Anthony J Austin, W. T. Cox. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2012

1,146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We developed a multi-faceted prejudice habit-breaking intervention to produce long-term reductions in implicit race bias. The intervention is based on the premise that implicit bias is like a habit that can be reduced through a combination of awareness of implicit bias, concern about the effects of that bias, and the application of strategies to reduce bias. In a 12-week longitudinal study, people who received the intervention showed dramatic reductions in implicit race bias. People who were concerned about discrimination or who reported using the strategies showed the greatest reductions. The intervention also led to increases in concern about discrimination and personal awareness of bias over the duration of the study. People in the control group showed none of the above effects. Our results raise the hope of reducing persistent and unintentional forms of discrimination that arise from implicit bias.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6d2d8282627bfcaf933e3d68d3e9c170b75f2f1f

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Citations in the corpus

Teachers Are People Too: Examining the Racial Bias of Teachers Compared to Other American Adults (2020, background): “A promising basic research effort showed that a 45-minute intervention that includes training in a variety of prejudice reduction techniques such as perspective-taking and imagining stereotype-disconfirming examples can reduce implicit bias levels over 2 months (Devine et al., 2012).”
Adverse childhood experiences and life opportunities: Shifting the narrative (2017, background): “Training teachers, school resource officers, administrators, and staff in trauma-informed practices (Stevens, 2014) and implicit bias (Devine, Forscher, Austin, & Cox, 2012) might reduce these discriminatory and negative disciplinary practices.”
Parsing Disciplinary Disproportionality (2014, background): “…early results suggest that it may be possible to identify and remediate sources of implicit bias: In a study conducted within a college course, Devine et al. (2012) reported that a 12-week instructional intervention that taught participants strategies for prejudice reduction resulted in a…”
Racism and Health: Evidence and Needed Research (2019, background): “However, Devine and colleagues (30) documented that a comprehensive program that deployed multiple strategies to reduce implicit biases found a sustained reduction in implicit biases in nonblack undergraduate students three months after the program began.”
Education not Incarceration: A Conceptual Model for Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disproportionality in School Discipline (2014, background): “Instead, policies that state this commitment but have clear steps to achieve equity and accountability for taking these steps are needed.(67,49) Although there is little research testing these insights in schools, we believe that policies that are more likely to be effective include three key compon”
A decade of studying implicit racial/ethnic bias in healthcare providers using the implicit association test. (2017, background): “For example, 528 undergraduate students trained on applying strategies to reduce implicit racial bias in everyday 529 situations demonstrated long-term reduction in implcit racial bias (Devine et al., 2012).”
The Bias of Crowds: How Implicit Bias Bridges Personal and Systemic Prejudice (2017, background): “Yet, average levels of implicit bias return stubbornly to baseline after a delay of days or weeks (Chapman et al., in press; Devine et al., 2012; Lai et al., 2016).”
Mixed Signals: The Unintended Effects of Diversity Initiatives (2019, background): “In an important demonstration of effective diversity intervention, Devine et al.’s prejudice habit-breaking model (Carnes et al., 2015; Devine et al., 2012, 2017; Forscher, Mitamura, Dix, Cox, & Devine, 2017) capitalizes on participants’ internal motivation to treat everyone fairly.”
Understanding Implicit Bias: What Educators Should Know. (2016, background): “Research suggests that this conscious awareness of one’s own implicit biases is a critical first step for counteracting their influence.(19) This awareness is especially crucial for educators to help ensure that their explicit intentions to help students learn and reach their full potential are not ”
Intergroup Perception and Cognition: An Integrative Framework for Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Social Categorization (2017, background): “Thus, although some brief interventions have proven to be effective immediately but not over time in changing implicit biases (e.g., Lai et al., 2016), other more sustained interventions may be more durable (Allport, 1954; Devine et al., 2012; Kawakami et al., 2000).”