Per the American Psychological Association “Implicit bias, also known as implicit prejudice or implicit attitude, is a negative attitude, of which one is not consciously aware, against a specific social group.” The social group could be a race, skin color, gender, body type, sexual orientation or age. Prejudice is different as it is a conscious explict aversion or dislike of a group of people. A large number of people think they are not biased at all. They say they treat all people equally however they don’t. Implicit bias was first studied in detail in the 1990’s.

We learn implicit bias quite early in life not just from society but from internal programming. Some experts think 80% of our brains work outside of conscious awareness. We used to live with people exactly like us. In our small tribes we learned we had to protect our resources and ourselves from others. Others were in a different tribe and they looked different from us. We are programmed to categorize and we like to catagorize things. So what served us in the past is failing us now. In our global society to solve problems we will greatly benefit from releasing our implicit bias.

Mahzarin Banaji, PhD, one of the pioneers of implicit bias research reports from 2007 until 2020 anti gay bias has gone down 64%. Younger people are a part of this change. Race and skin color bias decreased only by 25%. Anti elderly sentiments, disability and body weight bias have not changed. Every day in the eating disorder clinic I see how body weight bias hurts people. Mahzarin Banaji, thinks we need first to raise awareness we have a bias. We need to associate the people in groups of our bias with good things. Often we don’t even know people from the groups of our implicit bias. We also need system changes, help from institutions and large government organizations. The health care instiution where I work is addressing this. One of the many trainings I took for health care professionals and bias mentioned that when we are stressed out our implicit bias increases.

I am reading a book call Breaking the Age Code by Yale professor Becca Levy. She writes about how negative age stereotypes don’t just hurt others. As we get older the stereotypes hurt ourselves. One of her exercises is to say the first five words that come into your head when you think of an older person. In China one of those words is wisdom not one mentioned much in the United States. In Japan there is a national holiday Respect for the Aged Day. I was lucky to have a grandmother who was a dynamo. She raised me. A big regret at 88 was that she had to take a small break between mowing the front and back lawn. A life long learner she took every adult ed class that fit her schedule. She would never tell anyone her age. I questioned her as to why. She said, “People treat me differently when they know how old I am.”