Unconscious Bias: Implicit Attitudes and What They Mean

Posted on April 9, 2025

By Carli Friedman, CQL’s Director of Research

What are Attitudes?

There are two kinds of attitudes, explicit and implicit. Explicit attitudes are those we’re consciously aware of. For example, you know how you feel about dogs and on a survey about dogs could tell people about how you feel. Implicit attitudes are unconscious attitudes that we may not be aware we have. For example, you may think you don’t mind snakes but when you see a snake you automatically jump.

Our explicit and implicit attitudes may not always match. Not only do you not always know what your implicit attitudes are but sometimes you may feel hesitant to share with someone how you really feel because you feel bad or guilty about it. For example, most people explicitly say they think positively about disabled people. But when we look at their implicit attitudes, we find that most people actually are implicitly biased against disability. Unfortunately, our attitudes can go on to impact our behavior, even in ways we don’t realize.

How Implicit Attitudes Work

A lot of these differences have to do with how implicit attitudes work. Because our brains have a limited amount of attention, to help speed up our processing, our brains try to use strategies to categorize information. In the case of people, we categorize them into ingroups – people that are similar to us – and outgroups – people that are different from us. We tend to have more favorable attitudes towards ingroups than outgroups. Even if groups are made up, like if we are told to wear a blue t-shirt, we’ll automatically like the other people that are assigned to wear blue better than the people that are assigned red.

Of course this also happens related to our identities; not only do we tend to prefer ingroups, but we also internalize society’s messages about groups, which informs how we think. Sometimes society’s messages can even override the impact of ingroup/outgroup status – the bias we internalized may override our preferences, even about our own identity, especially if it is a marginalized identity. For example, someone with a disability may have negative attitudes about other disabled people even though they share an ingroup because society constantly bombards us with ableist ideas about disability and the person may internalize those messages.

Measuring Implicit Attitudes

One of the most common methods used to measure implicit attitudes is the implicit association test (IAT; Greenwald, 1998). IATs have people sort words and pictures to examine how they make associations unconsciously based on their reaction time. For example, people are usually quicker at reacting when disability is associated with bad than when it is associated with good because of society’s messages about disability being bad.

In the Intersecting Disability and Race Implicit Association Test (IDRA-IAT; Friedman, 2025) I developed a new technique to examine people’s attitudes towards different combinations of disability and race identities. In the pilot study, I found bias was common and most people implicitly preferred nondisabled white people, then disabled white people, then nondisabled people of color, and then disabled people of color. If you take one of our intersectional IATs, chances are you’ll probably have somewhat similar results because of the messages we receive from society about disability and race, and their intersection.

Your Implicit Attitudes

However, there are some important things to keep in mind about your score on any IAT, including the IDRA-IAT. First, a negative score doesn’t mean you’re a bad person – just because you have a negative score doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be discriminatory. Also, our IAT scores can fluctuate and change, including based on context and recent experiences, and if you ‘practice’ taking IATs and get quicker at them. Your aim in taking an IAT shouldn’t be to ‘prove’ that you’re good or bad, but just to raise your own awareness of how you may think in ways you may not consciously realize, since doing so is important to improving our attitudes.

Changing our Implicit Attitudes

It can be really difficult to change and eliminate our biases, in large part because of how we are constantly internalizing these messages from society as mentioned above. However, the more we learn about implicit bias and how it works, including our own implicit attitudes, the better we are equipped to help make changes. For example, if you find out you have negative implicit attitudes, you might feel guilty or even defensive. But research by Vitriol and Moskowitz (2021) suggests that if we are more open, it may be easier to change our attitudes. Now that you know more about your implicit attitudes, try to be more conscious of the associations you may make or the messages we’re receiving from society. For example, it’s pretty common for villains in tv or movies to have disabilities or facial scars. It’s also common for disabled characters to be dependent or portrayed as having lives not living. Try to be better at recognizing these messages in media and what they teach us about disability and why they are problematic. Once you’re more aware of the associations you may be making, you can try to make more of a conscious effort to stop.

A Few Recommended Resources

Learning more about attitudes and intersectionality, including recognizing the messages we internalize from society, is a great first step to improve our awareness. Below I include a few readings and resources to help you get started:

• Annamma, S. A., Connor, D., & Ferri, B. (2013). Dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit): Theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/ability. Race Ethnicity and Education, 16(1), 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2012.730511
• Annamma, S. A., Jackson, D. D., & Morrison, D. (2017). Conceptualizing color-evasiveness: Using dis/ability critical race theory to expand a color-blind racial ideology in education and society. Race Ethnicity and Education, 20(2), 147-162. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2016.1248837
• Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of anti‐discrimination doctrine, feminist theory and anti‐racist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139-167.
• The Disability Visibility Project
• Deerinwater, J., Ho, S., Thompson, V., Wong, A., Erevelles, N., & Morrow, M. (2023). A conversation on disability justice and intersectionality. In M. H. Rioux, A. Buettgen, E. Zubrow, & J. Viera (Eds.), Handbook of disability: Critical thought and social change in a globalizing world (pp. 1-22). Springer.
• Friedman, C. (2024). Ableism and modern disability attitudes. In G. Bennett & E. Goodall (Eds.), The Palgrave encyclopedia of disability. Palgrave Macmillian. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-40858-8_29-1
• Friedman, C. (2025). The Intersecting Disability and Race Attitudes Implicit Association Test. Rehabilitation Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/rep0000623
• Leaving Evidence by Mia Mingus
• Mallipeddi, N. V., & VanDaalen, R. A. (2022). Intersectionality within critical autism studies: A narrative review. Autism in Adulthood, 4(4), 281-289. https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2021.0014
• Ramp Up Your Voice
• Schalk, S. (2022). Black disability politics. Duke University Press.  https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/62545
• Sins Invalid

References:

• Friedman, C. (2025). The Intersecting Disability and Race Attitudes Implicit Association Test. Rehabilitation Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/rep0000623
• Greenwald, A. G., McGhee, D. E., & Schwartz, J. L. K. (1998). Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(6), 1464-1480. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.74.6.1464
• Vitriol, J. A., & Moskowitz, G. B. (2021). Reducing defensive responding to implicit bias feedback: On the role of perceived moral threat and efficacy to change. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 96, 104165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104165

Looking for information about how to uninstall Inquisit after taking an intersectional IAT? Go here for instructions.