Excerpts from
Wait: The Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy
“Doctors and Implicit Racism”
Doctors generally don’t seem racist. They swear an oath to treat patients equally,
and most try hard to do so. Even as medicine has become more business focused,
students overwhelmingly choose medical practice because they want to help people,
regardless of race. When doctors of all kinds are quizzed about racial stereotypes, they
score high for tolerance and low for bigotry.
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Paraphrase the italicized statement above.
Yet more than one hundred studies have shown that bias and prejudice among
doctors leads them to treat patients differently based on race. Doctors are far more
likely to refer a patient suffering chronic renal failure for a kidney transplant if he is
white than if he is black. Doctors treating heart attacks are up to twice as likely to
administer a thrombolytic drug meant to break up clots in the coronary arteries if
the patient is white than if he is black. In general, doctors are more likely to provide
treatment and medication – whether for psychiatric illness, cancer, or broken bones
– for whites than for blacks.
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Summarize the above paragraph in one sentence.
To try to resolve this contradiction, researchers administered a series of tests
designed to determine whether doctors implicitly (unconsciously) favored whites
over blacks. The tests revealed, as expected, that the doctors unconsciously viewed
whites more positively than blacks. The same tests have demonstrated this kind of
bias in millions of people, including doctors, no surprise there. But the tests also led
to a new finding, and the answer to the puzzle. Simply put, doctors who
unconsciously favored whites over blacks gave whites more treatment than blacks.
Doctors undertreated blacks not because of conscious racism, but because of
unconscious racial preferences. But why is unconscious prejudice winning out over
conscious tolerance?
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Explain what the “contradiction” is between the information in
paragraph one and paragraph two.
When Dana Carney and her colleagues conducted the doctor racism experiment,
they were worried that some participants might figure out that the study was
designed to test implicit racism and thereby skew the results. So they asked the
doctors to say what they thought the purpose of the study was. That question
inadvertently revealed a possible solution to the problem of implicit racism.
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Why would some participants figuring out what the test was designed
for “skew” the results?
About one-quarter of the doctors surmised that the study was designed to test racial
bias, even before the researchers asked any questions. The researchers excluded
those doctors from the main results, but also saw this subgroup as a possibility.
They separately checked if these doctors recommended different treatment than the
others. They did. Although this “aware” subgroup, like their peers, had an implicit
preference for whites over blacks on the test, they actually prescribed more, not
less, treatments for black patients.
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Predict why the doctors in this “aware” subgroup would prescribe more
treatments for black patients than whites.
In other words, once doctors understood that race was an issue, race was no longer
an issue they counterbalanced their implicit bias, like a driver adjusting to a
misaligned steering wheel. The implication is that if you have implicit racial biases,
you should know that fact and think about it. Doctors who pause to consider their
test scores for implicit bias, when they see a black patient, have some protection
against their own unconscious racial preferences. We can counter unconscious
racial favoritism with conscious racial awareness. Substitute any stereotyped group
into the above passages and you have an apt description of many of the world’s
problems. And perhaps, a partial solution.
Extra-Credit: Visit the Harvard “Project
Implicit” site and take the “Race” Implicit
Association Test to determine your
unconscious biases, and write about it
and how you can begin to protect against
your unconscious biases (one page).
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/