The effects of implicit biases on real-life client discrimination among public officials

Abstract

Discriminatory behavior is often assumed to partly be a result of implicit or unconscious biases. However, to my knowledge, no published experimental studies exist on the presence of such attitudes among public officials such as teachers or police officers and the related effects on real-life client discrimination. This study attempts to fill this research gap by combining a field experiment that captures ethnic discrimination among principals with an implicit attitude test (IAT) capturing their implicit attitudes toward Arab parents. The results suggest that Swedish elementary school principals have a moderately negative implicit bias toward Arabs according to the IAT. However, their implicit associations do not appear to drive the differential treatment of clients to a significant degree. Hence, implicit biases as captured by the IAT may possibly not be the most significant drivers of ethnic discrimination today among public officials.