Selection Problems in the Presence of Implicit Bias

Understand

Over the past two decades, the notion of implicit bias has come to serve as an important component in our understanding of discrimination in activities such as hiring, promotion, and school admissions.

• Research on implicit bias posits that when people evaluate others -- for example, in a hiring context -- their unconscious biases about membership in particular groups can have an effect on their decision-making, even when they have no deliberate intention to discriminate against members of these groups.
• A growing body of experimental work has pointed to the effect that implicit bias can have in producing adverse outcomes.
• Here we propose a theoretical model for studying the effects of implicit bias on selection decisions, and a way of analyzing possible procedural remedies for implicit bias within this model.