BIO
Anthony G. Greenwald (New York, United States) has been Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington since 1986, and Professor Emeritus there since 2020. Previously, from 1965 to 1986, he held a professorship at the Ohio State University. He received his BA from Yale (1959) and MA (1961) and PhD (1961) from Harvard University. Author of six books and more than 180 scholarly articles, he has served on the editorial boards of thirteen psychology journals. Greenwald was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007 and is also a member of the American Psychological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is co-founder and president of the non-profit organization Project Implicit, which works to advance the science of implicit cognition and its influence on decision-making.
CONTRIBUTION
The unconscious processes that shape attitudes: implicit bias
“Professors Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji developed the implicit association test, which enables reliable measurement of implicit bias and its effects on decision-making”. The “implicit bias” the committee refers to was first put forward by Greenwald and Banaji in their 1995 paper “Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self-esteem and Stereotypes,” published in the journal Psychological Review. In it, the two researchers described what was known about implicit attitudes and stereotypes, while acknowledging that there was as yet no means of measuring them. “We ended that article with a sentence saying that it would really be nice to have a measure that could assess individual differences in implicit attitudes and stereotypes,” Greenwald recalls today.
Armed with this motivation and the work of several decades, the Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington came up with a test that measured reaction times in classifying prompts, a method both easy to use and readily obtainable. He called it the implicit association test (IAT) and convinced Banaji and one of her postdoc students Brian Nosek to apply the method in further research.
“We gave people a chance to experience it and they were very surprised by the results,” he relates. “In the first test, we applied what we called the race attitude IAT, which measures associations of black race and white race with pleasant and unpleasant valence or categories. Taking it myself, I discovered I had a stronger association of black with unpleasant than with pleasant and the reverse for white. And that implicit attitude was one that I didn’t at all want to have and in fact didn’t know I had.”
The IAT allows to measure and better understand attitudes that are hard to measure via self-diagnostic techniques, either because the subjects themselves are not aware of their attitudes or because some prejudices, like racism or sexism, are socially frowned on. “We know that these biases kick in at a very young age, from about two years old. And they are also much more widespread in the population than the explicit biases that people admit to in self-report measures; saying, for instance, that men are not better at science than women.”
This method has served as a starting point for numerous applications in clinical psychology, education, marketing and diversity management, and has been used for data collection in over 2,000 papers. Greenwald himself is currently applying the science in a legal context. “After I retired from teaching, I started on a second career in the law courts, helping people who are suing on the basis of discrimination to win their cases using the concepts of implicit bias.”
The story of IAT and its uses was the subject of the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People, which Greenwald co-wrote with Mahzarin Banaji. It was subsequently removed from public libraries in a number of U.S. states after being popularized by Hillary Clinton in her 2016 presidential campaign.
