But she dares to go where other people don’t.”. Jennifer L. Eberhardt is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford University and a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. Nowadays, Oakland’s officers make stops only for documented reasons and ignore minor violations such as double parking. It also became clear to her how different her world was from that of her classmates—how her relatives routinely got pulled over by the police, for example, whereas those of her classmates almost never did. For her dissertation, she decided to study one of the best-known examples—the “other race” face recognition bias. “That is one of the most horrible, fantastic stories ever!” said Noah, a black South African. She, like other experts, says one effective countermeasure is to slow down, to move your thinking from the primitive, reactive parts of the brain to more reflective levels. “And I was like, wow, because normally this experiment always works.” She began to wonder how unconscious bias influences our perceptions. But some of the laughs were painful. In a follow-up study, students who viewed a video of police beating a black man after glimpsing an ape were more likely to say the beating was deserved. Discussing research her and her colleagues have conducted, as well as the research of other social psychologists, Eberhardt’s talk covered a range of outcomes of stereotypical associations, including the propensity to associate Black Americans with crime, and to support punitive policies when they disparately impact Black Americans. The Oakland police have a long record of scandals. Jennifer Eberhardt is a social psychologist at Stanford University and a leading authority on unconscious bias. Discussing unconscious racial bias, which she has studied for years, the Stanford University psychologist mentioned the “other-race effect,” in which people have trouble recognizing faces of other racial groups. Eberhardt, a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” award winner in 2014, has long been putting her insights to work. Contrary to her fears, her new classmates were welcoming. After analyzing more than 28,000 traffic stops, Eberhardt and her team found that the data supported the residents’ distress. Rather than chase a suspect into a blind alley, officers are encouraged to call for backup, set a perimeter, and make a plan before closing in. J ennifer Eberhardt is a MacArthur “genius grant” winner and psychology professor at Stanford University who studies implicit bias. (1987) from the University of Cincinnati, an A.M. (1990) and Ph.D. (1993) from Harvard University. When Jennifer Eberhardt appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah in April 2019, she had a hard time keeping a straight face. 5,716 words. Just keep your hands on the steering wheel real quick.”. Black people were also stopped more often than white drivers for minor violations and indistinct reasons rather than “actionable intelligence” such as a traffic violation or outstanding warrant. Another tack is to introduce what Eberhardt calls friction into the system. Through interdisciplinary collaborations and a wide-ranging array of methods -- from laboratory studies to novel field experiments -- “She’s not the only one working in social cognition or on police issues or on implicit bias. In the late 1990s, four officers calling themselves the Riders would brutalize and plant evidence on people. “Before these results, our officers would have told you that close to 90% of those stops were based on intelligence,” Armstrong says. Jennifer L. Eberhardt received a B.A. Jennifer Eberhardt Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do New York: Viking, 2019. © 2021 American Association for the Advancement of Science. As a result, the number of police shootings and officer injuries dramatically dropped. Subjects recognize a gun that gradually comes into focus faster when “primed” with a glimpse of a black face. Eberhardt has written that the phrase “they all look alike,” long the province of the bigot, “is actually a function of biology and exposure.” There’s no doubt plenty of overt bigotry exists, Eberhardt says; but she has found that most of us also harbor bias without knowing it. But it was true. Sign up for periodic news updates and event invitations. When students viewed faces of their own race, brain areas involved in facial recognition lit up more than when viewing faces of other races. Students also had more trouble remembering faces of races other than their own. Jennifer Eberhardt makes it clear that racism operates at all levels, and it fills me with hope to know that she is fighting it at all levels. Eberhardt’s finding, added to earlier studies showing similar associations, suggests a dangerous sequence of cognitive events, especially in situations when adrenaline runs high. Reading Time: 4 minutes Jennifer L. Eberhardt is a professor of psychology at Stanford University whose research explores race, bias, and inequality; she is the author of Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do.. What We Discuss with Jennifer L. Eberhardt: What’s going on in the brain that creates and maintains bias. From 1995 to 1998 she taught at Yale University in the Departments of Psychology and African and African American Studies. Both black and white police officers used similar disrespectful language with black motorists, which tells Eberhardt that although some of that behavior may be racist, most probably arises from unconscious patterns that somehow get transmitted during training or fieldwork. After growing up in a black Cleveland neighborhood, she had a formative experience in middle school when her family moved to a predominantly white suburb. Jennifer Eberhardt drew from her 20-plus years of research and teaching as a Stanford University professor for her book Biased. Select News Coverage of Jennifer L. Eberhardt. Professors Jennifer Eberhardt and Dan Jurafsky, along with other Stanford researchers, detected racial disparities in police officers’ speech after analyzing more than 100 hours of body camera footage from Oakland Police. Research Initiatives and Recommendations To Improve Police-Community Relations in Oakland, Calif. ... Amrita Maitreyi, B.S., and Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Ph.D. To understand and improve police-community relations in Oakland, Calif., the Stanford research team is analyzing body-worn camera (BWC) footage, community resident surveys, police training The work, Fiske says, is “very disturbing but also spot-on in terms of the science.” Eberhardt doesn’t know how those ideas made their way into the minds of her study participants, mostly white undergraduates. At Stanford, she co-directs Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions, a group of researchers who aim to solve problems in education, health, economic mobility, and criminal justice. It’s a matter of experience, acting on biology: If you grew up among white people, you learned to make fine distinctions among whites. “Drawing on her pioneering research, Jennifer Eberhardt’s new book offers a powerful exploration of how racial bias seeps into our classrooms, college campuses, police departments, and businesses.” —Bruce Western, author of Punishment and Inequality in America and Professor of Sociology, Columbia University Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt is a professor of psychology at Stanford. She’s a social-scientific Virgil, offering expert commentary that illumines the book’s otherwise lightless descent into the hellish depths of racial prejudice. About Jennifer L. Eberhardt, PhD. Using the familiar dot-probe technique, she primed a group of students with subliminal images of black or white faces, followed by vague images of various animals, including apes. Jennifer Eberhardt’s research shows subconscious connections in people’s minds between black faces and crime, and how those links may pervert justice. The results, published in PNAS in 2017, confirmed that police routinely used less respectful language when speaking to black people than to white people. AAAS is a partner of HINARI, AGORA, OARE, CHORUS, CLOCKSS, CrossRef and COUNTER. A book summary of the 3 big ideas, 2 most compelling quotes and 1 action you can take from Biased by Dr Jennifer Eberhardt. Eberhardt’s team decided to stay on and help us through that process … and that’s why we got so much buy-in from our officers.”. The data included reasons for the stop, the race of the driver, whether the car was searched, and whether the driver was handcuffed or charged with an offense. Jennifer Eberhardt, Ph.D., is Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor of Public Policy, Professor of Psychology, and Faculty Co-Director of SPARQ. Monday, October 19, 2020 As society continues to reflect on how to address issues of race, bias, and policing, SPARQ Co-Director Jennifer Ebherhardt shares her expertise and data-driven learnings from her long-term work on this issue. In the 19th century, prominent scientists such as Louis Agassiz and Paul Broca embraced “racial science,” which saw black people as an evolutionary step between apes and white people. Eberhardt hasn’t shied away from some of the most painful questions in U.S. race relations, such as the role of bias in police shootings. Jennifer L. Eberhardt is a social psychologist investigating the subtle, complex, largely unconscious yet deeply ingrained ways that individuals racially code and categorize people, with a particular focus on associations between race and crime. Through collaborations with experts in criminology, law, and anthropology, as well as novel studies that engage law enforcement and jurors, Eberhardt is revealing new insights about the extent to which race imagery and judgments suffuse our culture and society. Long since discredited, such ideas have not disappeared. Discussing unconscious racial bias, which she has studied for years, the Stanford … They collected body camera footage from 1 month’s worth of traffic stops in 2014—981 stops by 245 officers—and hired professional transcribers to capture everything police said in those stops, nearly 37,000 utterances. Through interdisciplinary collaborations and a wide array of research methods, Eberhardt has revealed the startling, and often dispiriting, extent to which racial imagery and judgments suffuse our culture and society, and in particular shape actions and outcomes … She has a Ph.D. from Harvard, and is the recipient of many prestigious awards, including a 2014 MacArthur “genius” award. WOMAN TO WATCH: Jennifer Eberhardt, Social Psychologist & Associate Professor at Stanford University. Eberhardt has been especially active in criminal justice, playing a key role in the court-ordered reform of the Oakland police department, which has a history of toxic community relations. Currently working with anthropologists to better articulate the process of cognitive dehumanization that occurs to justify marginalizing and discriminatory practices, Eberhardt is unearthing nuanced insights about how we see and experience racial difference. She and colleagues did a series of experiments using the dot-probe paradigm, a well-known method of implanting subliminal images. We love a movie with a lawyer who frees an innocent man or, one where a woman uncovers the corruption at a state penitentiary. “Dr. She has been affiliated with Stanford University since 1998, where she is currently an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and co-director of SPARQ, a Stanford center aimed at offering Social Psychological Answers to Real-World Questions. Drawing on her pioneering research, Jennifer Eberhardt’s new book offers a powerful exploration of how racial bias seeps into our classrooms, college campuses, police departments, and businesses. Jennifer Eberhardt: Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do. More power to you, sister. The MacArthur Foundation gave Stanford's Jennifer Eberhardt a "genius" grant for ... Eberhardt’s research has shown. Another study of unconscious bias found that teachers were more likely to discipline black students—not on the first offense, but on the second: The teachers apparently were quicker to see “patterns” of bad behavior in black children. She studies the psychological association between race and crime and the dehumanization of Black Americans in contemporary society. So she trained herself to recognize features she had never paid attention to before—“eye color, various shades of blond hair, freckles,” she wrote in her book, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do. Stanford University psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt has done a multi-year exploration of policing in America. Bio A social psychologist at Stanford University, Jennifer Eberhardt investigates the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime. 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