We all have biases that we may be aware of, but how do we combat the ones we aren't? Eberhardt's book looks at racial bias and prejudice (specifically about black people) that our country is currently facing. As this came out in 2019, it touches on police brutality before George Floyd and the alt-right white supremacy before the Proud Boys. I spent quite a lot of the book wondering what research Eberhardt would point to in order to explain some of the most recent racist events in the US today.

This book reminded me a lot of "Caste" by Isabel Wilkerson. Like "Caste," Eberhardt does a great job including personal stories of bias and race issues alongside her stellar research and studies. It gave me so much to think about regarding the ways that I might be biased simply because I grew up in the US with such inherent racism and bias already baked into the culture. Although Eberhardt is extremely smart and is an academic, all of this information still felt accessible and applicable to real-life.

I hope Eberhardt writes some sort of follow-up to this book - there's so much more to be studied in this field and her interpretations and conclusions are invaluable.

Thank you netgalley for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
This was a thorough, sociological book on the importance of implicit bias and how it affects our communities. Black citizens are often victims of implicit bias and it is especially lethal when it is used in the police force. The author explains through sociological experiments how our own bias colors our lenses and makes us see danger where there is none. She brings up a lot relevant points on how our social constructs many times controlled by the media, social networks and our own parenting can lead to generations of implicit bias that later become difficult to remove. But she offers hope that through effective training, police officers can better identify when there is a true threat vs their own implicit bias.

BIASED by Jennifer L. Eberhardt is subtitled "Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do." The book itself is split into three parts: What Meets the Eye; Where We Find Ourselves; and The Way Out. Eberhardt, a recipient of a 2014 MacArthur "genius" grant and a professor of psychology at Stanford, defines implicit bias as "a kind of distorting lens that's a product of both the architecture of our brain and the disparities in our society." Eberhardt makes this issue truly relatable by sharing stories and experiences from her own life. One early example revolves around her move during middle school and the ensuing difficulty of distinguishing between her new - and mostly white - classmates. In addition, she discusses several cases of shootings by police (complete with bystander and family reactions) and the marches in Charlottesville. Other examples involve bias in hiring decisions and the workplace or in relation to social media. Throughout the text, Eberhardt explains further in sections dealing with the science of recognition or the scientific lens in order to "pull back from the isolated case[s] and examine larger forces at work." In all, Eberhardt includes roughly twenty pages of notes and links to other scholarly work.

I am looking forward to sharing this important and engaging title with teachers and students, especially since our school is continuing to offer professional development activities related to implicit bias and confirmation bias. BIASED would be a helpful guide in exploring Eberhardt's fundamental question: "How does race shape who we are and how we experience the world?" As she says, "there is hope in the sheer act of reflection. This is where the power lies and how the process starts." BIASED received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist ("Accessible and eye-opening, this should be required reading in high-school social-issue classes.").

This was a great read, as it was based on facts and backed up those facts with statistics. The author laid out the information in a way that was not confrontational. A great read!

Human psychology is both wonderful and confounding. Psychology was my first love in the social sciences. It was my undergraduate focus and the discipline in which I conducted my first professional-quality research. It still enraptures me today, and I can’t describe my excitement to finally be teaching psychology for the first time this fall. At the same time, studying the human mind at this level can be a sobering, morale-squashing endeavor. But it is never hopeless. Psychology will not always give you the answers, but as a science it can guide you in the right direction, slowly but surely. That makes psychology hopeful, even when surveying the darkest corners of the human condition.

Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Phd, captures this tension exquisitely in her new book (releasing tomorrow, March 26), Biased. She takes on the subject of bias in the context of police shootings and other instances of inherent bias in today’s culture. This means that the primary focus is on racial bias and stereotypes, and for good reason: Eberhardt also has personal experience that speaks volumes on this subject. However, Eberhardt does not limit her study to racial bias but also offers examples and insight on gender bias as well. It is a comprehensive view of cognitive bias with a distinct focus.

Eberhardt uses history in order to both portray racial bias and speak on the development of the field of cognitive bias research in the social sciences. She speaks in depth on Social Darwinism and other theories that feed on cognitive bias (subjects that need more direct discussion in our current era), and in order to situate the subject in its historical context she discusses the social scientist Walter Lippman at length. Lippman (who displayed a bit of bias himself throughout his career) was the first to apply the idea of “stereotyping” in the social sciences. Eberhardt quotes Lippman in order to help readers grasp the power of stereotypes:

“There is economy in stereotyping”, he wrote. “For the attempt to see all things freshly and in detail, rather than as types and generalities, is exhausting…. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety…. [W]e have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage with it.”
We stereotype because we’re human and we cannot process data well. It’s simply easier to put things and people into “types and generalities” than it is to process everything separately. And, guess what, a lot of times we are right. But that’s what lulls us into complacency and makes us think our stereotypes are reliable. They are not. They are misleading, dangerous, and destructive. They lead us into bias.

Racial biases seep into every aspect of our lives without our awareness. Eberhardt makes this clear in her original research and relays others’ as well. The following passage contains the most shocking (for me) revelation:

Researchers Max Weisbuch, Kristin Pauker, and Nalini Ambady chose eleven popular television shows that have positive representations of black characters — including CSI and Grey’s Anatomy, where black characters are doctors, police officers, and scientists. The researchers showed study participants ten-second clips of a variety of white characters interacting with the same black character, but with the sound muted and the black characters edited out of the frame. Participants who were unfamiliar with the shows were asked to watch a number of these clips and to rate how much each unseen character was liked and was being treated positively by the white characters on the screen. Sometimes the unseen character was black, and sometimes the unseen character was white. A consistent pattern emerged when the researchers pooled the ratings: participants perceived the unseen black characters in these popular shows to be less liked and treated less positively by the other characters than the unseen white characters. The black characters were surrounded by a cast of white characters who — through their subtle facial expressions and body movements — communicated less regard for them. And the television viewers were affected by this: The more negative the nonverbal actions directed at the unseen black characters, the more antiblack bias the study participants revealed on an implicit association test following the showing. That is, there was evidence for a type of “bias contagion.” The researchers found this to be the case even though the study participants were unable to identify any consistent pattern in treatment of the white and black characters when asked to do so directly.
So where is the hope? Eberhardt devotes much of the book to this question. There are pathways out of bias, although none of them are sure. But there is most definitely hope. Her explorations of tech companies NextDoor and Airbnb share the problems that these giants encountered with respect to stereotyping and bias, but they also provide the solutions that NextDoor and Airbnb employed to successfully combat these issues. I won’t spoil the details of these success stories, but know that they provide hope.

It also seems that exposure and discussion, in the right context, can cure some bias. This does not mean that bias will eventually go away as our world becomes more cosmopolitan. It does not mean we can sit back and wait it out. It means we need to work to provide the environment for such exposure and discussion to occur.

It also means we need to be aware of the bias within ourselves and not think someone is attacking us when it is pointed out, directly or indirectly. I wanted to find a reason to reject the study about TV shows and racial bias, but I found that I couldn’t. Why did it bother me so much? Because if actors in TV shows can display racial bias without even thinking about it, then I could too. Anti-black bias isn’t even contained to white people either (a fact that becomes clear throughout Biased). It is something deeply ingrained in our culture, in our bones, in our unconscious thoughts. Awareness is the first step to dealing with it. Which is why you need to read this book. It haven’t seen or heard of a more coherent and complete discussion of bias. It could be the next classic book in modern cognitive and social psychology.

I received this book as an eARC courtesy of Viking and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

An eye opening ground breaking look at bias ,bias that seems inherent in everyone in all level of societies.Dr.Eberhardt shares with the Oakland police officers she is lecturing to the story of her son insisting that a black man on their plane trip looks like his dad ,yes his dad is black but other then that there is nothing in common between the two men.Then the heart wrenching moment her young son whispers to her I hope he doesn’t rob us,yes even at this young age the son of a black man somehow is biased.
This is an important book that I learned so much about the layers of bias throughout our lives told in a clear involving honest matter Perfrct for college courses book club discussions highly recommend. #netgalley #penguinviking,

This is the kind of informative nonfiction that I like to see -- clearly written, incorporating broad statistics and study findings with concrete examples, correlating arguments to current or historical events, and the author's use of personal anecdotes or stories told to her to make the content of her work really connect on a personal level. This is a really well executed book on implicit bias that threads the needle between acknowledging that implicit bias is something that we all inherit & are therefore not personally to blame for the problem's origin while still pushing individuals to do their part to change themselves & the world around them. A few of the stories really stuck with me, particularly the arc of her own son's understanding of his own perceptions of black men & how he is increasingly at the receiving end of those perceptions from others as a young black man.

Would definitely recommend! I could see this working well for a book club type environment