Fair Measures: A Behavioral Realist Revision of 'Affirmative Action'

By Jerry Kang, Mahzarin R. Banaji. 2006

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

New facts recently discovered in the mind and behavioral sciences have the potential to transform both lay and expert conceptions of affirmative action. Drawing on recent findings in implicit social cognition (ISC) and applying a legal methodology called behavioral realism, the authors advance four arguments. First, evidence of pervasive implicit bias allows us to avoid problematic backward- and forward-looking justifications for affirmative action and instead focus on addressing discrimination here and now. Second, evidence of biased interpretation and stereotype threat suggests that merit is currently being mismeasured, and that more accurate measurement processes should be adopted. Third, evidence of the malleability of implicit bias suggests interventions different from the traditional social contact hypothesis, such as deploying debiasing agents. Finally, instead of an arbitrary deadline, a better terminus for various affirmative action programs is when our society reaches alignment between explicit normative commitments and measures of implicit bias. Through this analysis of the legal and policy implications of cutting-edge social cognitive research, the authors shed the freighted term affirmative action and produce instead a scientific and normative common ground in favor of fair measures.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae652ed489716ac1d606711882770be61acb2634

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Citations in the corpus

Unconscious Racism: A Concept in Pursuit of a Measure (2008, background): “Concern about combating unconscious racism has also begun to influence legal debates on the proper function of antidiscrimination policies (Kang & Banaji 2006, Mitchell & Tetlock 2006).”
Engaging rational discrimination: exploring reasons for placing regulatory constraints on decision support systems (2010, unknown): “29 Kang and Banaji (2006).”
The existence of implicit bias is beyond reasonable doubt: A refutation of ideological and methodological objections and executive summary of ten studies that no manager should ignore (2009, background): “…findings (see Blasi and Jost, 2006; Faigman, Dasgupta, & Ridgeway, 2008; Greenwald and Krieger, 2006; Jolls and Sunstein, 2006; Kang, 2005; Kang and Banaji, 2006; Krieger and Fiske, 2006; Mentovich and Jost, 2008; but see Mitchell and Tetlock, 2006; Wax, 2008, for dissenting views). possess…”
Race and the decision making of juries (2007, background): “…associations and thoughts (see Greenwald & such as those rendered by jurors is the subject of debate, implicit associations have myriad potential implications for the legal system (Kang & Banaji, 2006; Krieger, 2004), and are worth at least considering in the domain of juror decision making.”
Implicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Women in Philosophy (2013, background): “A clear way to break down the stereotypes is to make sure that people are exposed to excellent women in philosophy ( Blair 2002 ; Kang and Banaji 2006 ).”