Stereotypes shape inferences in philosophical thought, political discourse, and everyday life. These inferences are routinely made when thinkers engage in language comprehension or production: We make them whenever we hear, read, or formulate stories, reports, philosophical case-descriptions, or premises of arguments – on virtually any topic. These inferences are largely automatic: largely unconscious, non-intentional, and effortless. Accordingly, they shape our thought in ways we can properly understand only by complementing traditional forms of philosophical analysis with experimental methods from (...) psycholinguistics. This paper seeks, first, to bring out the wider philosophical relevance of stereotypical inference, well beyond familiar topics like gender and race. Second, we wish to provide philosophers with a toolkit to experimentally study these ubiquitous inferences and what intuitions they may generate. This paper explains what stereotypes are, and why they matter to current and traditional concerns in philosophy – experimental, analytic, and applied. It then assembles a psycholinguistic toolkit and demonstrates through two studies how potentially questionnaire-based measures can be combined with process measures to garner evidence for specific stereotypical inferences and study when they ‘go through’ and influence our thinking. (shrink)

Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments involve unusual cases. We present empirical reasons to doubt the reliability of intuitive judgments and conclusions about such cases. Inferences and intuitions prompted by verbal case descriptions are influenced by routine comprehension processes which invoke stereotypes. We build on psycholinguistic findings to determine conditions under which the stereotype associated with the most salient sense of a word predictably supports inappropriate inferences from descriptions of unusual (stereotype-divergent) cases. We conduct an experiment that combines plausibility (...) ratings with pupillometry to document this “salience bias.” We find that under certain conditions, competent speakers automatically make stereotypical inferences they know to be inappropriate. (shrink)

Intuitive judgments elicited by verbal case-descriptions play key roles in philosophical problem-setting and argument. Experimental philosophy's ‘sources project’ seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions which help us assess our warrant for accepting them. This article develops a psycholinguistic explanation of intuitions prompted by philosophical case-descriptions. For proof of concept, we target intuitions underlying a classic paradox about perception, trace them to stereotype-driven inferences automatically executed in verb comprehension, and employ a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to elicit the relevant (...) stereotypical associations of perception- and appearance-verbs. We obtain a debunking explanation that resolves the philosophical paradox. (shrink)

Is gender-emotion stereotype a “one-hundred percent” top-down processing phenomenon, or are there additional contributions to cognitive processing from background clues when they are related to stereotypes? In the present study, we measured the gender-emotion stereotypes of 57 undergraduates with a face recall task and found that, regardless of whether the emotional expressions of distractors were congruent or incongruent with targets, people tended to misperceive the fearful faces of men as angry and the angry faces of women as fearful. (...) In particular, there was a significantly larger effect in the distractor-incongruent condition. The revised process-dissociation procedure analysis confirmed that both automatic and controlled processing have their own independent effects on gender-emotion stereotypes. This finding supports a dual-processing perspective on stereotypes and contributes to future research in both theory and methodology. (shrink)

Work on a computer program called SMILE + IBP (SMart Index Learner Plus Issue-Based Prediction) bridges case-based reasoning and extracting information from texts. The program addresses a technologically challenging task that is also very relevant from a legal viewpoint: to extract information from textual descriptions of the facts of decided cases and apply that information to predict the outcomes of new cases. The program attempts to automatically classify textual descriptions of the facts of legal problems in terms of Factors, a (...) set of classification concepts that capture stereotypical fact patterns that effect the strength of a legal claim, here trade secret misappropriation. Using these classifications, the program can evaluate and explain predictions about a problem’s outcome given a database of previously classified cases. This paper provides an extended example illustrating both functions, prediction by IBP and text classification by SMILE, and reports empirical evaluations of each. While IBP’s results are quite strong, and SMILE’s much weaker, SMILE + IBP still has some success predicting and explaining the outcomes of case scenarios input as texts. It marks the first time to our knowledge that a program can reason automatically about legal case texts. (shrink)

One of the strongest defences of free speech holds that autonomy requires the protection of speech. In this paper I examine five conditions that autonomy must satisfy. I survey recent research in social psychology regarding automatic behaviour, and a challenge to autonomy is articulated. I argue that a plausible strategy for neutralising some of the autonomy-threatening automatic responses consists in avoiding the exposure to the environmental features that trigger them. If this is so, we can good autonomy-based pro (...) tanto reasons for controlling exposure to certain forms of speech. (shrink)

Eliciting negative stereotypes about ageing commonly results in worse performance on many physical, memory, and cognitive tasks in adults aged over 65. The current studies explored the potential effect of this “stereotype threat” phenomenon on older adults’ emotion recognition, a cognitive ability that has been demonstrated to decline with age. In Study 1, stereotypes about emotion recognition ability across the lifespan were established. In Study 2, these stereotypes were utilised in a stereotype threat manipulation that framed an (...) emotion recognition task as assessing either cognitive ability, social ability, or general abilities. Participants then completed an emotion recognition task in which they labelled dynamic expressions of negative and positive emotions. Self-reported threat concerns were also measured. Framing an emotion recognition task as assessing cognitive ability significantly heightened older adults’ reports of stereotype threat concerns. Despite this, older adults’ emotion recognition performance was unaffected. Unlike other cognitive abilities, recognising facially expressed emotions may be unaffected by stereotype threat, possibly because emotion recognition is automatic, making it less susceptible to the cognitive load that stereotype threat produces. (shrink)

The present study investigates whether or not reading about corrupt politicians influences peoples’ subsequent judgments toward political actors’ supposed corruptness. We expected this media stereotype priming effect to be dependent on pre-existing implicit stereotypes. It was hypothesized that only those participants would show a media priming effect who already have a strong automatic association between ‘politicians’ and ‘corrupt’ in memory prior to reading a further facilitative article. Conversely, people who do not have a comparable biased cognitive association should (...) not. Data from an experiment support this hypothesis: We found pre-existing implicit stereotypes to moderate the media priming effect on explicit stereotypes, but only when the newspaper article covered the “corrupt politician” media stereotype with sufficient salience. Furthermore, the experiment showed that antagonistic media primes did not produce a media priming effect at all. Antagonistic articles were simply not able to prime corruption-related memory traces. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that private associations might be legitimately constrained by a requirement of reasonableness. I present a list of goods that freedom of association protect, and argue that the limits to associational freedom have to be sensitive to the nature of these goods. In defending this claim, I cast doubt on two popular liberal arguments: One is that attitudes cultivated in the private sphere are not likely to spill over into the public arena. The other is that (...) governmental intervention into the inner life of private associations will jeopardise attaining some associational goods. I challenge these assertions in two ways: First, I argue that the value of associations cannot be measured only in terms of the effects it has on their members. We should also pay attention to the long-term effects on society. Second, I argue that imposing some constraints on the sorts of activities associations might pursue does not necessarily threaten any associational good. These challenges are backed up by research coming from social psychology that suggests that an important part of human behaviour is automatic. I focus on the automaticity of social stereotypes and their causal effectiveness in producing behaviour. The upshot of the argument is that spillover effects are likely to happen. I argue that this is problematic for liberalism because citizens have an interest in exercising a sense of justice. The fact that racist or sexist attitudes cultivated in private spills over the public sphere provides weighty reasons to intervene in those associations. (shrink)

ABSTRACTUsing faces as the priming stimuli, the present study explored the influence of facial expressions on the activation of gender stereotypes using a lexical decision paradigm. Experiment 1 explored the activation of gender stereotypes when the facial primes contained only gender information. The results showed that gender stereotypes were activated. In Experiment 2, the facial primes contained both gender category and expression information. The results indicated that gender stereotypes were not activated. Experiment 3 required the participants (...) to make emotion, gender, or impression decisions concerning the facial primes before the lexical decision task. The results showed that gender stereotypes were not activated in emotion and impression decisions conditions, whereas stereotypes were activated in gender decisions condition. These finding suggest that facial expressions can inhibit automatic activation of gender stereotypes, unless the perceivers perform gender categorization processing to prime f... (shrink)

It has been argued that humans can face an ethical/epistemic dilemma over the automatic stereotyping involved in implicit bias: ethical demands require that we consistently treat people equally, as equally likely to possess certain traits, but if our aim is knowledge or understanding our responses should reflect social inequalities meaning that members of certain social groups are statistically more likely than others to possess particular features. I use psychological research to argue that often the best choice from the epistemic (...) perspective is the same as the best choice from the ethical perspective: to avoid automatic stereotyping even when this involves failing to reflect social realities in our judgements. This argument has an important implication: it shows that it is not possible to successfully defend an act of automatic stereotyping simply on the basis that the stereotype reflects an aspect of social reality. An act of automatic stereotyping can be poor from an epistemic perspective even if the stereotype that is activated reflects reality. (shrink)

We argue that stereotypes associated with concepts like he-said–she-said, conspiracy theory, sexual harassment, and those expressed by paradigmatic slurs provide “normative inference tickets”: conceptual permissions to automatic, largely unreflective normative conclusions. These “mental shortcuts” are underwritten by associated stereotypes. Because stereotypes admit of exceptions, normative inference tickets are highly flexible and productive, but also liable to create serious epistemic and moral harms. Epistemically, many are unreliable, yielding false beliefs which resist counterexample; morally, many perpetuate bigotry and (...) oppression. Still, some normative inference tickets, like some activated by sexual harassment, constitute genuine moral and hermeneutical advances. For example, our framework helps explain Miranda Fricker’s notion of “hermeneutical lacunae”: what early victims of “sexual harassment” — as well as their harassers — lacked before the term was coined was a communal normative inference ticket — one that could take us, collectively, from “this is happening” to “this is wrong.”. (shrink)

This paper pioneers the use of methods and findings from psycholinguistics in experimental philosophy’s ‘sources project’. On this basis, it clarifies the epistemological relevance of empirical findings about intuitions – a key methodological challenge to experimental philosophy. The sources project (aka ‘cognitive epistemology of intuitions’) seeks to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions, which help us assess their evidentiary value. One approach seeks explanations which trace relevant intuitions back to automatic cognitive processes that are generally reliable but predictably (...) generate cognitive illusions under specific vitiating circumstances. The paper develops and experimentally tests such an explanation for intuitions at the root of a historically influential paradox about perception (‘argument from illusion’). The explanation traces these intuitions to stereotype-driven amplification, an automatic process routinely involved in language comprehension (e.g., understanding philosophical case-descriptions). Distributional semantics analysis and a forced-choice plausibility ranking task are employed to establish the relevant verb-associated stereotypes. The paper argues that the inferences facilitated by these stereotypes are generally reliable, but shows that vitiating circumstances obtain in the formulation of the targeted paradox. On this basis, the paper explores two complementary strategies for assessing the evidentiary value of intuitive judgments. (shrink)

Oppression is easily recognized. That is, at least, when oppression results from overt, consciously professed racism, for example, in which violence, explicit exclusion from economic opportunities, denial of adequate legal access, and open discrimination perpetuate the subjugation of a group of people. There are relatively clear legal remedies to such oppression. But this is not the case with covert oppression where the psychological harms and resulting legal and economic exclusion are every bit as real, but caused by concealed mechanisms subtly (...) and systematically employed. In many cases, those with power and privilege use cultural stereotypes in order to sustain an unjust status quo. This is so even if the biases are implicit, automatic, and contrary to the consciously professed beliefs of the stereotyper. Furthermore, since many of these biases are not consciously reasoned into one's system of beliefs, and since they are notoriously difficult to bring to consciousness and dislodge via direct, logical confrontation, some other creative means of resistance is needed. I argue that an indirect and imaginative route through subversive humor offers a means to raise consciousness about covert oppression and the mechanisms underlying it, reveal the errors of those with power who complacently sustain systematic oppression, and even open those people up to changing their minds. Subversive humor confronts serious matters, but in a playful manner that fosters creative and critical thinking, and cultivates a desire and skill for recognizing incongruities between our professed ideals and a reality that does not meet those standards. Successful subversive wits create fictional scenarios that highlight such moral incongruities, but, like philosophical thought experiments, they reveal a moral truth that also holds in the real world. Such humor offers opportunities for "border crossing" where the audience is encouraged to see from the perspectives of marginalized people who, because they inhabit ambiguous spaces in between the dominant and subordinate spheres, are in an epistemically privileged position with respect to matters of oppression. Subversive humorists open their audiences to the lived experiences of others, uncover the absurdities of otherwise covert oppression, and appeal to our desire to be truthful and just. (shrink)

To establish the claim that racism is an ideology that consists of having morally impermissible attitudes towards people in virtue of their racialised identities, Appiah claims that a (false) belief in race is not automatically morally wrong. This paper examines what is involved in believing in races and shows that believing in races is in itself morally problematic as it involves stereotyping that undermines agency.

For almost half a century dual-stream advocates have vigorously defended the view that there are two functionally specialized cortical streams of visual processing originating in the primary visual cortex: a ventral, perception-related ‘conscious’ stream and a dorsal, action-related ‘unconscious’ stream. They furthermore maintain that the perceptual and memory systems in the ventral stream are relatively shielded from the action system in the dorsal stream. In recent years, this view has come under scrutiny. Evidence points to two overlapping action pathways: a (...) dorso-dorsal pathway that calculates features of the object to be acted on, and a ventro-dorsal pathway that transmits stored information about skilled object use from the ventral stream to the dorso-dorsal pathway. This evidence suggests that stored information may exert significantly more influence on visually guided action than hitherto assumed. I argue that this, in turn, supports the notion of skilled automatic action that is nonetheless agential. My focus here will be on actions influenced by implicit biases (stereotypes/prejudices). Action that is biased in this way, I argue, is in an important sense intentional and agential. (shrink)

[Eve] Sedgwick examines from an explicitly feminist, implicitly Marxist perspective the relation of homosexuality to more general social bonds between members of the same sex . She argues that the similarity between homosocial desire and homosexuality lies at the root of much homophobia. Moreover, she sees this tension as misogynist to the extent that battles fought over patriarchy within the homosocial world automatically exclude women from that patriarchal power. Thus she places homosexuality and its attendant homophobia within a wider dynamic (...) of social relationships.1Yet even as Sedgwick invents a more sophisticated definition of “homophobia,” she may permit misreading of a more elementary sort. Her use of vocabulary is troubling. In a slangy prose that regularly juxtaposes James Hogg and Louis Lepke, Tennyson and Howard Keel, references to the “campiness” of Thackeray’s “bitchy” bachelors or the “feminized” cuckolds of Wycherley’s The Country Wife seem tame enough. Yet there is a political difference between the jokes. One can burlesque fifties musicals or organized crime with impunity; to refer to sexually embattled men with feminine adjectives, however, is to reinforce a sexual stereotype that sees in the supposed effeminacy of homosexuals a sign of their deviance. Nor are women empowered when terms of female degradation like “bitch” are turned back against men: the ironic reversal does not challenge the terms’ validity but reaffirms it, showing they have an even wider range of applicability than had been thought. 1. Throughout my analysis, I use “homosexual” and “gay” exclusively in reference to male sexuality. I do so in part to echo Sedgwick’s emphasis and in part because the logic of my own argument does not empower me to speak on female homosexuality. David Van Leer is associate professor of English and American literature at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays and articles on American literature and popular culture. (shrink)

At the University of Sheffield during 2011 and 2012, a leading group of philosophers, psychologists, and others gathered to explore the nature and significance of implicit bias. The two volumes of Implicit Bias and Philosophy emerge from these workshops. Each volume philosophically examines core areas of psychological research on implicit bias as well as the ramifications of implicit bias for core areas of philosophy. Volume I: Metaphysics and Epistemology is comprised of two parts: “The Nature of Implicit Attitudes, Implicit Bias, (...) and Stereotype Threat,” and “Skepticism, Social Knowledge, and Rationality.” The first part contains chapters examining the relationship between implicit attitudes and “dual process” models of the mind; the role of affect in the formation and change of implicit associations; the unity (or disunity) of implicit attitudes; whether implicit biases are mental states at all; and whether performances on stereotype-relevant tasks are automatic and unconscious or intentional and strategic. The second part contains chapters examining implicit bias and skepticism; the effects of implicit bias on scientific research; the accessibility of social stereotypes in epistemic environments; the effects of implicit bias on the self-perception of members of stigmatized social groups as rational agents; the role of gender stereotypes in philosophy; and the role of heuristics in biased reasoning. (shrink)

Managing aggression in mental health hospitals is an important and challenging task for clinical nursing staff. A majority of studies focus on the perspective of clinicians, and research mainly depicts aggression by referring to patient-related factors. This qualitative study investigates how aggression is communicated in forensic mental health nursing records. The aim of the study was to gain insight into the discursive practices used by forensic mental health nursing staff when they record observed aggressive incidents. Textual accounts were extracted from (...) the Staff Observation Aggression Scale-Revised (SOAS-R), and Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis was used to identify short narrative entries depicting patients and staffs in typical ways. The narratives contained descriptions of complex interactions between patient and staff that were linked to specific circumstances surrounding the patient. These antecedents, combined with the aggression incident itself, created stereotyping representations of forensic psychiatric patients as deviant, unpredictable and dangerous. Patient and staff identities were continually (re)produced by an automatic response from the staff that was solely focused on the patient’s behavior. Such response might impede implementation of new strategies for managing aggression. (shrink)

Admission to a nursing home does not automatically blunt the desire or reduce the need for intimacy and sexuality in older residents. This ageist and ableist stereotype that older people are asexual or post-sexual negatively affects nurses and other healthcare professionals, as they are regularly faced with residents’ sexual expressions. How are nurses to view and respond appropriately if a clear understanding of current ethical concepts and argumentations about intimacy and sexuality in older adults is lacking? This study aimed to (...) document and better understand current ethical concepts and arguments about intimacy and sexuality in institutionalised older adults. We used PRISMA and Reporting of Systematic Reviews in Ethics guidelines in a systematic review of current ethical literature (2010 to 2023). Six databases were searched: PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, CINAHL, Atla, and Philosopher’s Index. Inclusion criteria were (1) publication was argument-based; (2) contained ethical concepts and arguments concerning intimacy and/or sexuality in institutionalised older adults; and (3) written in English, French, German, or Dutch. Our search returned 4371 publications; of those, 29 publications met our inclusion criteria. Since all included articles appeared in peer-reviewed journals, article quality was assumed to be sufficiently good. Our use of a modified version of the Qualitative Analysis Guide of Leuven showed that two main approaches characterised discussions of intimacy and sexuality in institutionalised older adults: (1) individual-cognitive–oriented approach and (2) relational-embodied–oriented approach. The first emphasises respect for autonomy and consent, fundamental to protecting rights and dignity. The second focusses on intentional bodily capacities and the interdependent nature of being human, both crucial for the emotional well-being of the residents, even when cognitive abilities decline. We conclude that the ethical landscape on sexuality in ageing has shifted, implying that changes are warranted on how ethicists, society, and healthcare professionals view sexual expressions of older adults. (shrink)

Information providing and gathering increasingly involve technologies like search ‎engines, which actively shape their epistemic surroundings. Yet, a satisfying account ‎of the epistemic responsibilities associated with them does not exist. We analyze ‎automatically generated search suggestions from the perspective of social ‎epistemology to illustrate how epistemic responsibilities associated with a ‎technology can be derived and assigned. Drawing on our previously developed ‎theoretical framework that connects responsible epistemic behavior to ‎practicability, we address two questions: first, given the different technological ‎possibilities available (...) to searchers, the search technology, and search providers, ‎who should bear which responsibilities? Second, given the technology’s ‎epistemically relevant features and potential harms, how should search terms be ‎autocompleted? Our analysis reveals that epistemic responsibility lies mostly with ‎search providers, which should eliminate three categories of autosuggestions: those ‎that result from organized attacks, those that perpetuate damaging stereotypes, and ‎those that associate negative characteristics with specific individuals.‎. (shrink)

In philosophical thought experiments, as in ordinary discourse, our understanding of verbal case descriptions is enriched by automatic comprehension inferences. Such inferences have us routinely infer what else is also true of the cases described. We consider how such routine inferences from polysemous words can generate zombie intuitions: intuitions that are ‘killed’ (defeated) by contextual information but kept cognitively alive by the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic salience bias. Extending ‘evidentiary’ experimental philosophy, this paper examines whether the ‘zombie argument’ against (...) materialism is built on zombie intuitions. We examine the hypothesis that contextually defeated stereotypical inferences from the noun ‘zombie’ influence intuitions about ‘philosophical zombies’. We document framing effects (‘zombie’ vs ‘duplicate’) predicted by the hypothesis. Findings undermine intuitions about the conceivability of ‘philosophical zombies’ and address the philosophical ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Findings support a deflationary response: The impression that principled obstacles prevent scientific explanation of how physical processes give rise to conscious experience is generated by philosophical arguments that rely on epistemically deficient intuitions. (shrink)

Brindley proposed that we initially generate movements , under higher cerebral control. As the movement is practiced, the cerebellum learns to link within itself the context in which the movement is made to the lower level movement generators. Marr and Albus proposed that the linkage is established by a special input from the inferior olive, which plays upon an input-output element within the cerebellum during the period of the learning. When the linkage is complete, the occurrence of the context (represented (...) by a certain input to the cerebellum) will trigger (through the cerebellum) the appropriate motor response. The movement is distinguished from the conscious movement by its now being automatic, rapid, and stereotyped. The idea is still controversial, but has been supported by a variety of animal studies and, as reviewed here, is consistent with the results of a number of human PET and ablation studies. I have added to the idea of context-response linkage what I think is another important variable: novel combinations of downstream elements. With regard to the motor system and the muscles, this could explain how varied combinations of muscles may become active in precise time-amplitude specifications so as to produce coordinated movements appropriate to specific contexts. In this target article, I have further extended this idea to the premotor parts of the brain and their role in cognition. These areas receive influences from the cerebellum; they are active both in planning movements that are to be executed and in thinking about movements that are not to be executed. From recent evidence, the cerebellar output extends even to what has been characterized as the ultimate frontal planning area, the cortex, area 46. The cerebellum thus may be involved in context-response linkage, and response combination even at these higher levels. The implication would be that, through practice, an experiential context would automatically evoke a certain mental action plan. The plan would be in the realm of thought, and could lead to execution. The specific cerebellar contribution would be one of the context linkage and the shaping of the response, through trial and error learning. The prefrontal and premotor areas could still plan without the help of the cerebellum, but not so automatically, rapidly, stereotypically, so precisely linked to context, or so free of error. Nor would their activities improve optimally with mental practice. (shrink)

The paper builds on a methodological idea from experimental philosophy and on findings from psycholinguistics, to develop and defend ordinary language analysis (OLA) as practiced in J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia. That attack on sense-datum theories of perception focuses on the argument from illusion. Through a case-study on this paradoxical argument, the present paper argues for a form of OLA which is psychologically informed, seeks to expose epistemic, rather than semantic, defects in paradoxical arguments, and is immune to the main (...) objections to ordinary language philosophising, including those arising from the semantic/pragmatics distinction: A key project in current experimental philosophy is to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions that help us determine what warrant thinkers have for accepting them. Psycholinguistic work on the role of stereotypes in verb-comprehension has shown that intuitive judgments can be generated by automatic cognitive processes that duplicate both semantic and pragmatic inferences and are shaped by dominant uses of words. For systematic reasons, philosophers are prone to unwittingly deviate from such dominant uses. Where this happens, they are liable to automatically infer unwarranted conclusions that strike them as intuitively compelling. OLA helps us to determine those dominant uses, to identify unwitting deviations from them, and thus to expose unwarranted intuitions – e.g., in the premises of paradoxical arguments. Ordinary language does not determine the bounds of sense but shapes our leaps of thought. The paper shows how this enables its ‘Austinian’ analysis to contribute to a novel, epistemic, resolution of philosophical paradoxes and problems. (shrink)

In analyzing implicit bias, one key issue is to clarify its metaphysical nature. In this paper, I develop a novel account of implicit bias by highlighting a particular kind of belief-like state that is partly constituted by phenomenal experiences. I call these states ‘qualiefs’ for three reasons: qualiefs draw upon qualitative experiences of what an object seems like to attribute a property to this very object, they share some of the distinctive features of proper beliefs, and they also share some (...) characteristics of what Gendler calls ‘aliefs’. I proceed as follows: First, I develop a general theory of qualiefs. Second, I argue that implicit bias involves generic qualiefs that involve experiences that have been shaped by stereotypes. Elaborating on the particular content of a generic qualief, I explain why we are unaware of the bias even though it involves an experience. Third, I demonstrate that the qualief-model best explains the key features of implicit bias: it accounts for the biases´ implicitness and automaticity. Moreover, it elucidates how implicit bias can be insensitive to logical form and evidence, but at the same time it can serve as propositional input to further mental states. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the potential of “equitech”—AI technology that improves equity. Recently, interventions have been developed to reduce the harm of implicit bias, the automatic form of stereotype or prejudice that contributes to injustice. However, these interventions—some of which are assisted by AI-related technology—have significant limitations, including unintended negative consequences and general inefficacy. To overcome these limitations, we propose a two-dimensional framework to assess current AI-assisted interventions and explore promising new ones. We begin by using the case of (...) human resource recruitment as a focal point to show that existing approaches have exploited only a subset of the available solution space. We then demonstrate how our framework facilitates the discovery of new approaches. The first dimension of this framework helps us systematically consider the analytic information, intervention implementation, and modes of human-machine interaction made available by advancements in AI-related technology. The second dimension enables the identification and incorporation of insights from recent research on implicit bias intervention. We argue that a design strategy that combines complementary interventions can further enhance the effectiveness of interventions by targeting the various interacting cognitive systems that underlie implicit bias. We end with a discussion of how our cognitive interventions framework can have positive downstream effects for structural problems. (shrink)

In his prophetic poems Blake conceives a perfection of humanity defined in part by the complete mutuality of its interdependent genders. Yet throughout the same poems he represents one of those mutual, contrary, equal genders as inferior and dependent , or as unnaturally and disastrously dominant. Indeed, females are not only represented as weak or power-hungry, they come to represent weakness and power-hunger . Blake's philosophical principle of mutuality is thus undermined by stereotypical metaphors of femaleness which I believe he (...) adopted automatically in his early poems and then tried to redress but found himself trapped by in his late works. Susan Fox is currently working on a book of poems and has written articles on Spenser and Blake as well as Poetic Forms in Blake's Milton. She is an associate professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. (shrink)

Recent empirical research has substantiated the finding that very many of us harbour implicit biases: fast, automatic, and difficult to control processes that encode stereotypes and evaluative content, and influence how we think and behave. Since it is difficult to be aware of these processes - they have sometimes been referred to as operating 'unconsciously' - we may not know that we harbour them, nor be alert to their influence on our cognition and action. And since they are (...) difficult to control, considerable work is required to prevent their influence. We here focus on the implications of these findings for epistemology. We first look at ways in which implicit biases thwart our knowledge seeking practices (sections 1 & 2). Then we set out putative epistemic benefits of implicit bias, before considering ways in which epistemic practices might be improved (section 3). Finally, we consider the distinctive challenges that the findings about implicit bias pose to us as philosophers, in the context of feminist philosophy in particular (section 4). (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a growing public discourse regarding the influence AI will have on the future of work. Simultaneously, considerable critical attention has been given to the implications of AI on gender equality. Far from making precise predictions about the future, this discourse demonstrates that new technologies are instances for renegotiating the relation of gender and work. This paper examines how gender is addressed in news media discourse on AI and the future of work, focusing on Germany. (...) We approach this question from a perspective of feminist technology studies and discourse analysis, exploring a corpus of 178 articles from 2015 to 2021 from German newspapers and newsmagazines. The findings indicate that critical AI and gender knowledge circulates in public discourse in the form of specific discursive frames, thematizing algorithmic bias, automatization and enhancement, and gender stereotypes. As a result, we show that, first, the discourse takes up feminist and scholarly discourse on gender and discusses AI in a way that is informed by social constructivism and standpoint theories. Second, gender appears as a—to some extent intersectional—diversity category which is critical to AI, while at the same time omitting important perspectives. Third, it can be shown that there is a renegotiating of the ideal worker norm taking place, and finally, we argue that the gendered frame of the powerful men developer responsible for AI’s risk is a concept to be challenged. (shrink)

Critics of the Implicit Association Test —a measure of the strength of a person’s automatic, memory-based association between two concepts, such as “black” and “threatening” or “white” and “caring”—have at least three main objections. Their symmetry argument is that the IAT should but does not give equally valid results for black-on-white and white-on-black racism. Their cultural-awareness argument is that the IAT illegitimately presupposes that use of racial stereotypes presupposes no stereotype acceptance, only stereotype awareness. Their completeness argument is (...) that at best the IAT measures only questionable or implicit, not explicit, bias because IAT ignores the fact that subjects’ conscious desires to avoid bias often enable them to check their biased behavior. Examining each of these anti-IAT stances, the paper summarizes the IAT and then argues for 6 main claims. Clarifying concepts like racism is important for progress in social science. IAT critics’ SA presupposes an ahistorical/acultural concept of racism. IAT critics’ AA presupposes a linguistically-insensitive concept of racism, one presupposing that the language we use provides no behavioral evidence for racism. IAT critics’ CA presupposes a concept of racism subject to conscious, deliberate control. IAT proponents endorse a more plausible concept of racism, one that is contextual, linguistically sensitive, and often not susceptible to conscious control. Although the IAT debate is unsettled, IAT critics’ use of a questionable concept of racism gives grounds for doubting their claims. (shrink)

During the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and ‘A great many people think they are thinking when they 1960s, behaviorist and Freudian theories gave way are merely rearranging their prejudices.’) Moral to mental models and information processing as the reasoning matters, but it matters primarily in social preferred framework in psychology. In the moral contexts in which people try to influence each other domain, Lawrence Kohlberg was a part of this and reach consensus with friends and allies. revolution. He built (...) on the earlier work of Jean Piaget This emphasis on quick, automatic affective [1] to develop a six-stage model of the development of reactions is supported by recent findings in social moral reasoning [2]. According to Kohlberg, moral psychology, such as: (1) that people evaluate others growth is driven not by simple brain maturation but and apply morally laden stereotypes automatically [9]; rather by experience in ‘role taking’, or looking at a (2) that motivations to maintain relationships and.. (shrink)

I defend Fricker’s virtue-theoretic proposals for grappling with epistemic injustice, arguing that her account is both empirically oriented and plausible. I agree with Fricker that an integral component of what we ought to do in the face of pervasive epistemic injustice is working to cultivate epistemic habits that aim to consistently neutralize the effects of such prejudices on their credibility estimates. But Fricker does not claim that her specific proposals constitute the only means through which individuals and institutions should combat (...) epistemic injustice. I therefore build on Fricker’s account by beginning to sketch a fuller picture of the structure of cultivating epistemic virtue. Virtue cultivation must, I argue, occur on two broad but interrelated fronts: first, the direct retraining of more automatic and unreflective patterns of thinking, feeling, and reacting to epistemic social reality, and second, the cultivation of more reflective, metacognitive virtues, such as the ability to swiftly identify contexts in which our first-order epistemic intuitions are likely astray. Although I articulate a range of individual-level obligations, my account is not individualistic. With Fricker, I argue that individual self-transformation is a necessary but not sufficient component of the struggle for epistemic justice. Accordingly, I sketch several ways in which individual virtue cultivation must be a socially and institutionally embedded process. Moreover, I argue that this process is ongoing. While most individuals cannot actually achieve such moral-epistemic ideals, many can (and therefore should try to) get much closer than they already are. (shrink)

Popular press suggests that gender diversity benefits the performance of work groups. However, decades of research indicate that such performance benefits of gender diversity are anything but a given. To account for this incongruity, in this conceptual paper we argue that the performance of gender-diverse work groups is often inhibited by self-reinforcing gender role expectations. We use the analogy of a flywheel to illustrate how gender role expectations tend to reinforce themselves via three mechanisms. Specifically, we argue that gender role (...) expectations shape (a) the allocation of jobs, tasks, and responsibilities, (b) the behavior of perceivers, and (c) the behavior of target women and men. In turn, these three consequences of gender role expectations tend to confirm the initial gender role expectations, thus creating an automatic, self-reinforcing flywheel effect. Such self-reinforcing gender role expectations provide superficial impressions of individual women and men’s actual knowledge and abilities at best. We therefore further propose that each of the three mechanisms of the flywheel of gender role expectations negatively affects group performance to the extent that gender role expectations inaccurately capture group members’ actual knowledge and abilities. Because the extent to which work group members rely on gender role expectations depends on how they form impressions of others, we propose that individuals’ motivation to form accurate impressions is crucial for inhibiting the flywheel of gender role expectations. We close by advancing an agenda for future research on each of the three areas of interest in our conceptual analysis: the flywheel effect of gender role expectations, the consequences of this flywheel effect for group functioning, and ways to motivate group members to form accurate impressions. (shrink)

Stereotypes are false or misleading generalizations about groups, generally widely shared in a society, and held in a manner resistant, but not totally, to counterevidence. Stereotypes shape the stereotyper’s perception of stereotyped groups, seeing the stereotypic characteristics when they are not present, and generally homogenizing the group. The association between the group and the given characteristic involved in a stereotype often involves a cognitive investment weaker than that of belief. The cognitive distortions involved in stereotyping lead to various (...) forms of moral distortion, to which moral philosophers have paid insufficient attention. Some of these are common to all stereotypes—failing to see members of the stereotyped groups as individuals, moral distancing, failing to see subgroup diversity within the group. Other moral distortions vary with the stereotype. Some attribute a much more damaging or stigmatizing characteristic (e.g. being violent) than others (e.g. being good at basketball). But the characteristic in question must also be viewed in its wider historical and social context to appreciate its overall negative and positive dimensions. (shrink)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been playing a significant role in acoustic modeling. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the advanced version of DNNs that achieve 4–12% relative gain in the word error rate (WER) over DNNs. Existence of spectral variations and local correlations in speech signal makes CNNs more capable of speech recognition. Recently, it has been demonstrated that bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) produces higher recognition rate in acoustic modeling because they are adequate to reinforce higher-level representations of acoustic (...) data. Spatial and temporal properties of the speech signal are essential for high recognition rate, so the concept of combining two different networks came into mind. In this paper, a hybrid architecture of CNN-BLSTM is proposed to appropriately use these properties and to improve the continuous speech recognition task. Further, we explore different methods like weight sharing, the appropriate number of hidden units, and ideal pooling strategy for CNN to achieve a high recognition rate. Specifically, the focus is also on how many BLSTM layers are effective. This paper also attempts to overcome another shortcoming of CNN, i.e. speaker-adapted features, which are not possible to be directly modeled in CNN. Next, various non-linearities with or without dropout are analyzed for speech tasks. Experiments indicate that proposed hybrid architecture with speaker-adapted features and maxout non-linearity with dropout idea shows 5.8% and 10% relative decrease in WER over the CNN and DNN systems, respectively. (shrink)

This article develops two figures of the social imagination: the stereotype and the emblem. To start with we explore the notion of social imagination, principally from Emile Durkheim, Gaston Bachelard and Maurine Godelier. Secondly, the article deepens the two notions of stereotypes and emblems supported by the works of the historian Bronislaw Baczko and the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld’s. Throughout the paper, the theoretical aims are illustrated with reference to coal-mining memory and heritage in the north of France.  .