Implicit Bias: Scientific Foundations

The assumption that human behavior is largely under conscious control has taken a theoretical battering in recent years.Although this assault in some ways resembles the previous century's Freudian revolution, there are important differences between the two.Freud's views of unconscious mechanisms were embedded in a theory that never achieved conclusive support among scientists, despite many empirical theory-testing efforts in the middle third of the twentieth century.'Consequently, most psychologists have abandoned Freud's psychoanalytic theory of unconscious mental processes.Theoretical conceptions of conscious control over human behavior were strongly re-established in the last third of the twentieth century, but the dominance of such views has been crumbling during the past two decades.Unlike the Freudian revolution, however, the new science of