All humans intend to obey the virtues of accuracy and fairness. We have learned that our actions can be self-defeating and inconsistent with our values—obstructing the very goals to which we are consciously and passionately committed. For this reason, even if conscious prejudice is genuinely absent, behavior can remain disjointed from values and drive decisions away from goodness because of implicit bias—a term introduced by Mahzarin Banaji and colleagues in the early 1990s.

Mahzarin Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University, will present a lecture on implicit bias on April 22, 2025, at 4 p.m. in the Trabant Theatre. Banaji’s lecture is part of the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences’ James M. Jones lecture series.

This lecture will focus on the often surprising and even perplexing manner by which implicit bias operates. Using the 40-year research path of her lab as a case study, Mahzarin Banaji will elucidate how she came to understand what implicit bias is as well as reactionary challenges to it, the impact of implicit bias on shaping life’s opportunities and outcomes, and the optimistic result she did not expect to encounter in her lifetime—that event implicit biases are reliably and rapidly moving towards neutrality.

Registration is required to attend this lecture.