Siobahn Hotaling is a founding member of the song writing showcase New York Artists Collective and a featured poet and performer. Using her background in psychology, Siobahn Hotaling has been studying research that addresses implicit bias in a variety of settings.
Implicit bias functions on an unconscious level, causing a person to make unfounded judgements about a particular social group. The bias in question might not necessarily align with a person’s conscious beliefs; for example, a staunchly anti-racist person might have implicit bias against people of other ethnicities or even their own ethnicity. The presence of implicit bias makes it more likely that people from disadvantaged groups will face prejudice, and less likely that they will be able to address it without causing confusion or accusations of over-sensitivity.
This effect extends to technology as well, with a range of facial recognition technologies finding it difficult to recognize faces with darker skin or non-white features. Infamously, in June 2020 there was an uproar on Twitter when a program turned a low-resolution photo of Barack Obama into a high-resolution picture of a white man. Meanwhile, at Amazon an automated resume review program seemed to favor men for technical roles and ignored women, leading to the program’s discontinuation. If the world is to be truly inclusive of everyone who lives in it, implicit bias must be addressed with dignity and openness to allow those disadvantaged by it to be treated with equality and fairness.
Siobahn Hotaling recognizes that much of our inherent - and therefore implicit - biases live in our subconscious; in fact, most of our biases are so ingrained in how we view the world that we don't even see them as biases at all, but as fact. At the same time, while we are not to be blamed or shamed for having bias - as we all have some form of it - as responsible humans living in an increasingly globalized world, it is up to us to do the work to identify, examine, and attempt to transform the biases we have, so we can create a more equitable and inclusive world.
Implicit bias functions on an unconscious level, causing a person to make unfounded judgements about a particular social group. The bias in question might not necessarily align with a person’s conscious beliefs; for example, a staunchly anti-racist person might have implicit bias against people of other ethnicities or even their own ethnicity. The presence of implicit bias makes it more likely that people from disadvantaged groups will face prejudice, and less likely that they will be able to address it without causing confusion or accusations of over-sensitivity.
This effect extends to technology as well, with a range of facial recognition technologies finding it difficult to recognize faces with darker skin or non-white features. Infamously, in June 2020 there was an uproar on Twitter when a program turned a low-resolution photo of Barack Obama into a high-resolution picture of a white man. Meanwhile, at Amazon an automated resume review program seemed to favor men for technical roles and ignored women, leading to the program’s discontinuation. If the world is to be truly inclusive of everyone who lives in it, implicit bias must be addressed with dignity and openness to allow those disadvantaged by it to be treated with equality and fairness.
Siobahn Hotaling recognizes that much of our inherent - and therefore implicit - biases live in our subconscious; in fact, most of our biases are so ingrained in how we view the world that we don't even see them as biases at all, but as fact. At the same time, while we are not to be blamed or shamed for having bias - as we all have some form of it - as responsible humans living in an increasingly globalized world, it is up to us to do the work to identify, examine, and attempt to transform the biases we have, so we can create a more equitable and inclusive world.
