In April of 2020, National Public Radio released a story regarding the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The news outlet reported that alarmingly, African Americans in multiple states were less likely to receive a coronavirus test even when they exhibited symptoms of COVID-19 such as a cough and fever. This is especially harmful to African American populations when taking into consideration the fact that minority groups tend to have higher rates of conditions like high blood pressure, kidney issues, and diabetes, all of which are risk factors for greater severity of COVID-19. Beyond a lesser likelihood of receiving efficient testing from doctors and thus slower essential treatment for the disease, racial and ethnic minority populations and people of lower socioeconomic status are also suffering as communities from biased location of testing at large. In Tennessee, multiple cities (e.g., Nashville and Memphis) have concentrated coronavirus testing in predominantly white, wealthy areas, with limited (if any resources) in lower-income and primarily black neighborhoods. More and more pockets of cases are becoming visible around the country, and many of them are concentrated among black communities. This concerns experts because those groups are the very populations that are at greater statistical risk of contracting worse cases of COVID-19, primarily due to the aforementioned likelihood of people of color suffering from chronic conditions. Poorer and more diverse neighborhoods may also be more vulnerable to COVID-19 because of limited internet access (and therefore important information about the virus) and a potential lack of transportation to increasingly popular drive-through testing sites, so testing access is more limited for these communities as a whole.
Dr. Yael Granot’s research focuses on implicit racial bias in a different context (primarily in deciding punishments based on visual attention and relating that to the legal system). Her research analyzes the pattern of individuals’ eye tracking when watching ambiguous fight scenes in an attempt to measure visual attention and see its relation to deciding punishments for people in different social groups (relating these punishments to race, which is a highly visible kind of social identification). She found that the kinds of visual attention paid to a member of the social outgroup (i.e., the person in the simulated situation that the participant did not identify with socially) led to a differing severity in punishment. In general, a slight visual focus on the person in the outgroup led to a harsher punishment. So when people pay a bit more attention visually to someone with whom they do not identify in some (primarily visual) social manner, they are more likely to punish that outgroup more harshly, exhibiting their implicit bias for groups that lack a connecting socially identifying component.
Though Dr. Granot focuses on demonstrating bias in visual attention and punishment, the types of patterns that she is identifying within a criminal justice setting can be more broadly observed in other areas of our society, one of which being in healthcare. Dr. Granot provided evidence of an inherent bias against social outgroups unless a participant was focusing more strongly on that outgroup, so in normal context that outgroup would likely be more harshly punished by that participant. Evidence of a similar inherent bias may be seen in the article described above, detailing doctors’ potential implicit bias against African Americans attempting to be tested for the coronavirus; this bias could potentially stem from a lack of social identification between doctors and African American patients, thus leading to a less understanding and sympathetic attitude toward that patient group. Additionally, those in charge of allocating resources like testing sites in various states may succumb to a similar kind of social identification bias if they come from regions of the state that are more comparable to the predominantly white and wealthy areas than to the poorer, majority-minority neighborhoods of cities. If this bias is present, it would mean that the social identification aspect would be present and preferential toward white and/or wealthier people, and lead to greater priority given to that population than to areas which may empirically need the resources more urgently, but do not have the advantage of positive social identification with those decision-makers and thus could be suffering more due to this possible implicit bias.
Sources:
Granot, Y., Balcetis, E., Schneider, K. E., & Tyler, T. R. (2014). Justice is not blind: Visual attention exaggerates effects of group identification on legal punishment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(6), 2196–2208. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037893
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