Guilty By Implicit Racial Bias: The Guilty/Not Guilty Implicit Association Test

Abstract

Legal scholarship on racial discrimination has turned to the science of implicit social cognition to explain how the human mind automatically manifests biases against disfavored social groups.'Much of this discourse on implicit bias focuses on the potential for massive, but hard to detect discrimination in the employment context. 2 Yet, other legal domains where implicit racial bias may lead to persistent racial inequalities remain underexplored, most notably in criminal law.Specifically, a crucial question still needs to be answered: do implicit biases affect jury guilty/not guilty verdicts in racially biased ways?Despite the broad incorporation of social science knowledge into legal discourse, a critical chasm continues to deter legal scholarship from fully achieving the social cognition-informed perspective it craves.Namely, legal scholarship on implicit bias lacks law-focused science.