One bias discussed, the self-fulfilling prophecy bias, has the potential to explain how in the end the standard conception of an excellent candidate gets confirmed. “We interviewed several women, but we are committed to excellence and so in the end… .”

What might explain that is a tendency to understand subsequent evidence in terms of our initial judgments. The medium-level committee really thinks the best candidates will come from Harvard, Princeton or Rutgers, but they are willing to look further afield? Well, lots of luck to them. They may in fact see the evidence in terms of their beliefs and not vice versa.

Thanks to the Philosophy Smoker for the link:
http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/

Next, a huge problem in philosophy, in my opinion, is the idea that collaboration implies that the collaborators are individually incompetent as philosophers, in contrast to merely lacking some background in a particular area. I think that this needs to be addressed, in papers, meetings, blogs, etc. The examples of multiple authors in *other* fields are legion, and normal, while in philosophy they are the exception. While it is true that argument has been a mainstay of philosophical checks and balances, nonetheless dialogue can take place in a slightly different model. It might be interesting to look for analogues in the restructuring of arguments to the repeated experiments employed by the sciences.

The two points above are related. In order to integrate experimental work with philosophy, one’s education must be extremely broad, and graduate schools, in this country at least, actively discourage that. Collaborations could overcome this deficit in our educational system.

Sylvie: Thanks for your comments. I think blogs can perform different functions; this one may be especially a repository for information and news letters. I wonder what chairs of search committees would do with a mailing about implicit biases. I’m hoping that the SPP can lay a foundation for it to be taken seriously. We’ll see.

Per the research on implicit bias, there are many interesting studies out there documenting this effect, yet there is surprising little knowledge about how widespread it is, or about ways to counteract it. If someone were willing to put together a very concise (4 pages or less, I think) overview of the main ideas and some references, to acquaint people with it, plus a short overview of ways to counteract or reduce the effect, this document could be mailed/emailed to the heads of search committees this year, for instance. That is the kind of concrete action that would be make a difference, I think.

There is a fairly well established tradition of looking at the effects of implicit prejudice on judgments regarding CVs and Resumes. To my knowledge, the first study of this sort was carried out by Arie Lewin and Linda Duchan (1971). They found a slight, though not statistically significant preference for male job candidates over female job candidates. A more recent, and in some ways more carefully controlled study by Rhea Steinpreis and her colleagues (1999) has found far more compelling evidence about the role of the perceived gender of a name on a CV in hiring and tenuring decisions. Steinpreis and her colleagues took two versions of a successful scientist’s CV (one that had secured her first tenure-track job, one that had secured early tenure) and put a paradigmatically male name (Brian Miller) on half of them and a paradigmatically female name (Karen Miller) on the other half. Participants were no more likely to recommend tenuring a male than a female candidate. However, both male and female participants were more likely to recommend hiring a male over a female candidate. Far more importantly, despite the identical records regarding the research, teaching, and service contributions, male candidates were evaluated more positively than female candidtates and many participants claimed that they would need more evidence that female candidates had done their own work (though no similar claims were made about male candidates)

Your question, then, about what we should do about such prejudices is one of the most pressing questions at the level of the institutional structures that continue to propagate robust gender-based asymmetries in the academy. Fortunately, there are tools and strategies for navigating these sorts of implicit prejudices once we become aware of their breadth as well as their depth. In another post on this blog (Oct 18th) you point to Virginia Valian’s fabulous work on non-conscious biases (and incidentally, Valian’s tutorials are also fabulous). There have also been some very promising attempts to attack diversity issues in hiring head on, carried out by the ADVANCE and STRIDE committees at the University of Michigan (I recommend strongly looking at their suggestions for evaluating candidates which can be found here). Of course, whether these strategies are likely to help at all is contingent on people in the discipline recognizing that there are implicit biases at play in our psychology that we can’t just suppress and move on. The fact is that non-conscious processes play an integral role in our psychology. Moreover, they are incredibly difficult to modulate. And, unfortunately, this is something that is hard for many academics to recognize.