Date: 18 November 2015
Time: 10:00–12:00
Jules Holroyd, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nottingham.
ABSTRACT
Many of us will have implicit racial biases: dispositions to certain affective or cognitive responses that are triggered by individuals' perceived racial identity. Such biases often encode stereotypes or negative evaluations, and can be implicated in discriminatory behaviour.
Should we hold each other morally accountable for such biases, and interact with each other in the ways that this would permit? For example, is it permissible to blame, or express condemnation, or address moral challenge to each other for such biased behaviour? One question this presses is whether we are responsible and liable to such reactions when we act in ways influenced by implicit bias. Another, which I focus on today, concerns whether it is efficacious to react with moral responses such as blame: does expressing blame reduce implicit bias, or increase it?
In this talk, I describe the context and method for a study that we have been conducting on the effects of blame on expressions of implicit bias.* I will provide an indication of our preliminary results, but also flag up the crucial questions - philosophical and empirical - that have arisen in the course of the study, which warrant further investigation.
*The study is conducted as part of the 'Bias and Blame' Leverhulme Project Grant (RPG-2013-326 ), Co-investigators are Dr Tom Stafford and Dr Robin Scaife, at The University of Sheffield.
Jules visited The Implicit Mind Workshop at the institute in May. Here you can see her talk:
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