The early research in implicit bias got a lot of attention.

Measures of implicit attitudes had a lot of variability and did not predict much behavior.

Research explored whether the measures could be improved.

Current work suggests these measures may predict what is happening societally rather than individually.

In the mid-1990s, there was an uptick in interest in the concept of implicit attitude (sometimes called implicit bias). A key motivation for this idea was the recognition that in industrialized nations like the United States, there had been a growing set of legal protections for historically marginalized groups like ethnic minorities that had led to decreases in overt acts of racism, but the overall social and economic position of members of those groups has not improved substantially.

One explanation for that observation is the prospect that people in these cultures have persistent prejudices that are not reflected in measurements of people’s overt attitudes. When asked about racist beliefs, for example, people may respond with sentiments of equality, but their actions may still be biased against group members in ways that maintain the status difference between groups.

These underlying attitudes, which are not reflected in explicit measures of prejudice, were called unconscious or sometimes implicit biases. The aim was primarily to distinguish them from biases that emerge from the application of a consciously held and........

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