Nick Byrd is a PhD candidate and Fellow at Florida State University, working in the Moral & Social Processing (a.k.a., Paul Conway) Lab in the Department of Psychology , and in the Experimental Philosophy Research Group in the Department of Philosophy at Florida State University . In this post, he introduces his paper “ What we can (and can’t) infer about implicit bias from debiasing experiments ”, recently published in Synthese. Implicit bias is often described as associative, unconscious, and involuntary. However, philosophers of mind have started challenging these claims. Some of their reasons have to do with debiasing experiments. The idea is that if debiasing is not entirely involuntary and unconscious, then implicit bias is not entirely involuntary and unconscious. Sure enough, some evidence suggests that debiasing is not entirely involuntary and unconscious (e.g., Devine, Forscher, Austin, & Cox, 2012 ). So it seems that implicit bias can be consci...
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