Title: Implicit Social Cognition
The field of implicit social cognition emerged from a focus on method development in response to an integration of principles of psychological science such as Helmholtz’s discovery that the world is not perceived directly but through a series of inferences, from psychology’s illustrious history of research on learning and memory, and from discoveries like Herbert Simon’s that human thought is boundedly rational. By walking the 40-year research path of my lab, I will tell the untold story of this research in the form of lessons learned, how I came to understand the surprising and even perplexing manner in which implicit bias operates and reactionary challenges to it; the signature behavioral result of implicit-explicit dissociation and association; the neural underpinnings of implicit cognition; its developmental trajectory; its malleability in response to macro sociopolitical influences; its prediction of socially significant outcomes in the domains of health, education, employment and legal treatment at the regional level. If time permits, I will point to current research on the manifestation of bias in LLMs today. The overarching call of this work is a simple one: to deeply understand implicit cognition so that we can do what we have done, as a species, so many times before in our history: to outsmart the limits of our own minds to ensure that our values of accuracy and fairness are translated into a more praiseworthy world.
Jillian Sifuentes
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