Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Biased Emotions: Implicit Bias, emotion & attributability

  • Published:
Review of Philosophy and Psychology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The topic of this paper is what I will call “biased emotion”. Biased emotions are emotions which are influenced by implicit bias. An example is racially biased fear. A person who explicitly denies that every black man is dangerous, might implicitly have the tendency to be afraid of black men. Biased emotions lead to certain types of behavior, such as avoidance behavior out of fear. Some have argued that behavioral expressions of biased emotions are not attributable. Because fearful behavior is supposedly reflex-like, it can be considered as “external” to who one really is. I will, however, argue that behavioral expressions of biased emotions are not reflexes but behavior which reflects a person’s goals and what one cares about. For this reason, I will argue that behavioral expressions of biased emotions are attributable and reveal who one truly is.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Intergroup anxiety is the most prominent emotional response related to implicit cognition and intergroup relations. (see Amodio and Hamilton, 2012).

  2. See (Eberhardt, 2019) for a discussion of some of these cases.

  3. Attributionists include Arpaly (2003), Brownstein, (2016), Frankfurt (1971, 1999), Hieronymi (2008), Jaworska (2007), Scanlon (1998), Shoemaker (2003), Smith (2005), Sripada (2016), and Watson (1975, 1996).

  4. Brownstein (2016), however, holds that some emotions are “in between” cases. They are in between reflexes and “cognitively mediated” mental states. However, it seems to me that if Brownstein holds that BEIB such as the shooter bias is care-based and that caring about “purported violent tendencies of black men” is a genuine case of caring, then it does not seem hard to commit to the claim that all emotions are care-based mental states.

  5. See also Solomon (1973) on the idea that denying responsibility for emotions is a case of bad faith.

  6. This phenomenon is known as “white fragility”. See, for instance, (DiAngelo, 2018).

  7. This might relate to the “better than average” bias: people are biased to think that they are better (or less racist) than average. See, for instance, (Howell et al., 2017).

References

  • Amodio, D. M., and H. K. Hamilton. 2012. Intergroup anxiety effects on implicit racial evaluation and stereotyping. Emotion 12 (6): 1273.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Amodio, D. M., and S. A. Mendoza. 2010. Implicit intergroup bias: Cognitive, affective, and motivational underpinnings. In Handbook of implicit social cognition: Measurement, theory, and applications, eds. B. Gawronski, and B. K. Payne, 353–374. The Guilford Press.

  • Arkes, H. R., and P. E. Tetlock. 2004. Attributions of implicit prejudice, or “would Jesse Jackson ’fail’ the Implicit Association Test?“. Psychological inquiry 15 (4): 257–278.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Arpaly, N. 2003. Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry Into Moral Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/0195152042.001.0001.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Brownstein, M. 2016. Attributionism and Moral Responsibility for Implicit Bias. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (4): 765–786.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brownstein, M. 2018. The implicit mind: Cognitive architecture, the self, and ethics. Oxford University Press.

  • Brownstein, M., A. Madva, and B. Gawronski. 2020. Understanding implicit bias: Putting the criticism into perspective. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (2): 276–307.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cameron, C. D., B. K. Payne, and J. Knobe. 2010. Do theories of implicit race bias change moral judgments? Social Justice Research 23 (4): 272–289.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carman, Mary. 2018. Emotionally guiding our actions. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (1): 43–64.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cooley, E., and B. K. Payne. 2017. ‘Using Groups to Measure Intergroup Prejudice’. Pers Soc Psychol Bull 43 (1): 46–59.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Correll, J., B. Park, C. M. Judd, and B. Wittenbrink. 2007. The influence of stereotypes on decisions to shoot. European Journal of Social Psychology 37: 1102–1117.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Correll, J., B. Wittenbrink, B. Park, C. M. Judd, and A. Goyle. 2011. Dangerous enough: Moderating racial bias with contextual threat cues. Journal of experimental social psychology 47 (1): 184–189.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • DiAngelo, R. 2018. White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press.

  • Eberhardt, J. 2019. Biased: The New Science of Race and Inequality. London: William Heinemann.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ellsworth, P. C., and K. R. Scherer. 2003. Appraisal processes in emotion. In Handbook of affective sciences, 572, V595.

  • Faucher, L. 2016. Revisionism and moral responsibility for attitudes. In M. Brownstein & J. Saul (eds), Implicit Bias and Philosophy 2, 115–145.

  • Faucher, L., and E. Machery. 2009. Racism: Against Jorge Garcia’s moral and psychological monism. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 39 (1): 41–62.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fiske, S. T., A. J. Cuddy, and P. Glick. 2007. Universal dimensions of social cognition: Warmth and competence. Trends in cognitive sciences 11 (2): 77–83.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frankfurt, H. 1971. Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person. The Journal of Philosophy 68 (1): 5–20.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frankfurt, H. 1999. On caring. Necessity, Volition, and Love, New York: Cambridge University Press, 155–180.

    Google Scholar 

  • Frantz, C. M., A. J. Cuddy, M. Burnett, H. Ray, and A. Hart. 2004. A threat in the computer: The race Implicit Association Test as a stereotype threat experience. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30: 1611–1611.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frijda, N. H. 2006. The laws of emotion. Mahwah: NJ Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gawronski, B., E. P. LeBel, and K. R. Peters. 2007. What do implicit measures tell us?: Scrutinizing the validity of three common assumptions. Perspectives on psychological science 2 (2): 181–193.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Greenwald, A., D. McGhee, and J. Schwartz. 1998. Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74: 1464–1480.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Greenwald, A., B. Nosek, and M. Banaji. 2003. Understanding and using the implicit association test: An improved scoring algorithm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2): 197–216.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hahn, A., C. Judd, H. Hirsh, and I. Blair. 2014. Awareness of Implicit Attitudes. Journal of Experimental Psychology-General 143 (3): 1369–1392.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Helm, B. 2001. Emotional reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hieronymi, P. 2008. Responsibility for believing. Synthese 161 (3): 357–373.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hillard, A. L., C. S. Ryan, and S. J. Gervais. 2013. Reactions to the implicit association test as an educational tool: A mixed methods study. Social Psychology of Education, 16 (3).

  • Howell, J. L., and K. A. Ratliff. 2017. Not your average bigot: The better-than‐average effect and defensive responding to Implicit Association Test feedback. British Journal of Social Psychology 56 (1): 125–145.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jaworska, A. 2007. Caring and internality. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (3): 529–568.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kahn, K. B., and P. G. Davies. 2017. What influences shooter bias? The effects of suspect race, neighborhood, and clothing on decisions to shoot. Journal of Social Issues 73 (4): 723–743.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lazarus, R. S. 1991. Emotion and adaptation. Oxford University Press.

  • Lazarus, R. S. 1999. Stress and emotion: A new synthesis. New York: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Levy, N. 2016. Implicit Bias and Moral Responsibility: Probing the Data. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (3): 3–26.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mandelbaum, E. 2016. Attitude, Inference, Association: On the Propositional Structure of Implicit Bias. Noûs 50 (3): 629–658.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Monteith, M. J., C. I. Voils, and L. Ashburn-Nardo. 2001. Taking a look underground: Detecting, interpreting, and reacting to implicit racial biases. Social Cognition 19: 395–417.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moors, A. 2017. The Integrated Theory of Emotional Behavior Follows a Radically Goal-Directed Approach. Psychological Inquiry 28 (1): 1–19.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moors, A., and M. Fischer. 2018. Demystifying the role of emotion in behaviour: toward a goal-directed account. Cognition and Emotion, 1–7.

  • O’Brien, L. T., C. S. Crandall, A. Horstman-Reser, R. Warner, A. Alsbrooks, and A. Blodorn. 2010. But I’m no bigot: How prejudiced White Americans maintain unprejudiced self-images. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 40: 917–946.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Payne, B. K., and J. W. Hannay. 2021. Implicit bias reflects systemic racism. Trends in cognitive sciences 25 (11): 927–936.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Payne, B. K., H. A. Vuletich, and K. B. Lundberg. 2017. The bias of crowds: How implicit bias bridges personal and systemic prejudice. Psychological Inquiry 28 (4): 233–248.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Roberts, R. C. 2003. Emotions: An essay in aid of moral psychology. Cambridge University Press.

  • Roseman, I. J., C. Wiest, and T. S. Swartz. 1994. Phenomenology, behaviors, and goals differentiate discrete emotions. Journal of personality and social psychology 67 (2): 206.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scanlon, T. M. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scarantino, A., and M. Nielsen. 2015. Voodoo dolls and angry lions: how emotions explain arational actions. Philosophical Studies 172 (11): 2975–2998.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schwitzgebel, E. 2002. A phenomenal, dispositional account of belief. Noûs 36 (2): 249–275.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shoemaker, D. W. 2003. Caring, identification, and agency. Ethics 114 (1): 88–118.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, A. M. 2005. Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life. Ethics 115 (2): 236–271.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Solomon, R. C. 1973. Emotions and choice. The Review of Metaphysics 27 (1): 20–41.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sripada, C. 2016. Self-expression: a deep self theory of moral responsibility. Philosophical Studies 173 (5): 1203–1232.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Watson, G. 1975. Free Agency. The Journal of Philosophy 72 (8): 205–220.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Watson, G. 1996. Two Faces of Responsibility. Philosophical Topics 24 (2): 227–248.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgement

I presented this paper at a couple of seminars led by Julien Deonna, Fabrice Teroni, Katrien Schaubroeck and Alfred Archer. I would like to thank these people, and everybody present at those seminars for their valuable feedback. I would also like to thank the anonymous referees for their comments.

Funding

Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) Junior Postdoctoral Fellowship − 1217120 N.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Philosophical Psychology - Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, University of Antwerp, Lange Sint-Annastraat 7 - S.208, 2000, Antwerp, Belgium

    Kris Goffin

  2. Research Group of Quantitative Psychology and Individual Differences, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Kris Goffin

Authors
  1. Kris Goffin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kris Goffin.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

None.

Additional information

Publisher’s note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary Material 1

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Goffin, K. Biased Emotions: Implicit Bias, emotion & attributability. Rev.Phil.Psych. 14, 1237–1255 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-022-00631-3

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-022-00631-3

Search

Navigation