Word formation. Major and minor ways of word formation content introduction

CHAPTER II. EDUCATING OURSELVES AND THE COURT ON THE TRUE NATURE
2.1 The Science of Implicit Bias
The true nature and extent of bias contradicts the traditional views of bias as being relatively rare and as being polarized between us (the good who are free from all negative bias) and (the bad) those with openly bigoted views. Bias is not measured in extremes and the vast majority of those who have bias that affect their decision-making are in the middle of the scale, not at either end. The true extent of bias suggests that far more people suffer from negative views of certain groups that we would like to believe including our friends, relatives and coworkers. The true nature and extent of bias can only be understood by those willing to look in themirror.
The true nature of bias consists of wide variety of feelings, attitudes, associations, perceptions, stereotypes, judgments, bias, and overt prejudice; which in turn can be either be openly stated, hidden, overtly conscious, bordering on the edge of awareness or seeping deep from within the subconscious. The true nature of bias includes an understanding that most people within American society have likely derived some degree of negative biases against at least the three main protected classes (Race, Gender, Age) and likely have such biases within their mind at some level of consciousness. 
The standard response to the above paragraph is as follows: “Well of course we all have biases, one cannot escape them. I prefer a certain basketball team and I favor my wife’s cooking.” That is not what we are talking about. History, experience, current studies and social science suggest that large numbers of person have negative, i.e. unfavorable associations or biases against blacks, women and the aged. Those attitudes affect decision-making to the detriment of those groups.
The ruler represents levels of consciousness and willfulness that exist in all of us. The purpose of the scale is to point out that bias involves a variety of relatively benign, overtly harmful, conscious and subconscious perceptions, not merely two extremes. The scale does not represent an opinion of exactly where any of those views of minorities fall along the conscious or willfulness scale. There is no need because Title VII prohibits adverse employment actions against minorities that is motivated anywhere along that scale. 

The true extent of bias includes an understanding that most people within our society have likely derived some degree of biases against protected classes and likely have such biases within their mind at some level of consciousness. To put it bluntly, at least regarding the three main classically protected groups, i.e. women, non-whites and the aged, in a room of 100 people 70 of them will have some degree of negative association with that person based on their age, gender or color.

They merely are intended to provide a simple visual reference for how a decision or a group of decisions can be impacted at any point by the filter of negative bias. Now think about the hundreds of decisions, thoughts and groups of decisions that a minority must negotiate every week in their employment. The impact of even one person in the chain of decision-making with some degree of negative bias is very real. 
That means they do not purport to measure racism or sexism. They only measure negative and positive attitudes toward groups. It may be that racists and sexists will also test for these lower levels of bias, but the point is to reveal the existence of bias in people who look and act like you and me. In short, even if the only bias that remained in society was subconscious, it would still provide barriers to minorities. Subconscious bias affects our decision-making regarding minorities as effectively as if we had hate in our hearts and minds.
Science can now clearly identify at least the bottom end of the scale. It can tell us that when it comes to the bare negative associations of certain protected groups or positive associations with historically advantaged groups, that an extremely high percentage of people in our society retain these negative associations.
There are three major categories of beliefs regarding groups. They are explicit attitudes, implicit stereotypes, and implicit attitudes. An attitude is a positive or negative evaluation of some object or idea. An implicit attitude can rub off on an associated object. The word implicit implies that these attitudes are sometime hidden from view and even from conscious awareness.
A stereotype is a belief that members of a group possess or share some characteristic. A stereotype and an attitude are closely related. Not all attitudes are stereotypes, but all stereotypes are attitudes. Evidence of attitudes shows how negative or positive feelings about a group can rub off on a person or object. Likewise, a negative attitude toward a person can likely rub off on views of actions taken by that person. The implicit attitude represents the bottom of the scale. Stereotypes represent some level of awareness between implicit attitudes and overt bias. The explicit attitude may represents the high end of the scale for that person, assuming that they openly admit their true attitudes or bias. 

Tests have been developed to measure the degree of hidden bias (implicit negative associations toward groups) in people who deny they have such bias. For example, people favor whites in this country, they favor males, and they favor the young. They do all this without regard to open racism or sexism or ageism and without feelings of animosity toward those groups. The actions of all of those individuals are intentional in the legal sense. They hire, they fire, they demote, but the awareness of the nature of their own bias is often very low (or, to the extent the awareness is high) the willingness to express them explicitly remains low.

The Implicit Association Test is a test that was designed to measure this hidden bias. The test was developed in the 1990’s because psychologists began to figure out that most people denied any bias or racism or sexism when asked. However the effects of racism and sexism continued to endure and the evidence of hidden bias remained. The question was how to measure bias that either people were denying or which people did not even know they had. The Implicit Association Test or IAT, was a direct response to this problem.
Implicit Association is a mental response that is so well learned as to operate without awareness, or without intention or without control. The Implicit Association Test is a test designed to measure responses to gender, race and age. Greenwald & Banaji, Psychology Review, (1995) This test measures the reactions of individuals to simple word associations and photos of person of a particular race, or age or gender. The test measures reaction time that the subject uses to associate words that the subject views as positive or negative to the class of persons being reviewed for implicit bias. The results of this testing are showing that it is no longer a question of who has bias against certain races or against age or gender, but to what degree.
TESTING SHOWS HIGH PREVALENCE OF BIAS
The implicit association test has been given to thousands of people across the United States and the world. The advent of the Internet allows millions of people to take it, and therefore vastly increases the database of information. The results from the IAT show a reasonable degree of scientific certainty about the following results regarding implicit bias concerning both attitude/preference and knowledge/stereotype:

1. Implicit bias can be large. Implicitly if not explicitly, the magnitude of bias toward particular social groups is large. Whether it is age, race, class, ethnicity, religion, physical appearance, or sexual orientation, there is now strong evidence that negative associations automatically arise when we think about the less favored (gay, elderly, African Americans, Arabs, Jews--when compared to Christians, the obese). 

2. The bias is widespread. Many, including the test developers themselves, show evidence of implicit biases, even in the absence of any conscious bias, and sometimes in opposition to the consciously expressed attitude.
3. Not all groups demonstrate the bias equally. Quite often implicit attitudes,
like explicit ones, favor the groups to which we belong. There are some surprising and psychologically meaningful deviations. For example, members of disadvantaged minorities and even statistical minorities do not show the same implicit ingroup preference as do members of majority and dominant groups. This finding often stands in contrast to the consciously expressed, strong in-group preference by members of disadvantaged or small groups.
4. Not all individuals demonstrate the bias equally. Following from the above finding, within groups, there is a wide range of individual differences. We have also learned that there are individual differences in the degree to which each person is contaminated, and that these individual differences in the strength of the bias is meaningful – those with stronger biases are likely to be more discriminatory in other behaviors than those who show a weaker bias.

5. Implicit bias is related to explicit bias. The work shows that consciously held attitudes and stereotypes may indeed be associated with the degree of implicit bias, such that those who report lower explicit bias also appear to be lower in their implicit bias (this finding can vary quite a bit depending on the category – race, political attitudes, etc.), but it is no longer possible to ignore the fact that the two are related. Since conscious attitudes are controllable and can be consciously adopted, this provides a path whereby implicit attitudes can be influenced.

6. Implicit bias is plastic. Among the more optimistic revelations from recent data is the finding that seemingly minor shifts in the environment (such as an imagery exercise or the presence of a particular person) can change the magnitude of the bias that is observed. For example, the presence of an African American experimenter appears to lower anti-Black bias, and imagining women in positions of authority lowers the Female+weak bias. These findings raise questions about the power of the immediate situation in determining which one of may possible attitudes is expressed.
Source - Mahzarin Banaji - Notes on Implicit Bias
The ideas and data of implicit association and the IAT clearly makes visible the bottom end of the scale of those motivations prevented by Title VII. It shows that the nature of bias includes an entire range of motivations and conscious awareness. It makes known the true extent of bias within our society. Finally, it either is, or soon will be able to establish that the possession of attitudes measure by the IAT actually causes motivation that can adversely impact on protected groups.