ABSTRACT
Research in social psychology focuses on the psychological mechanisms involved in and underpinning discrimination. This chapter explores some of the ways in which insights from research in social psychology may require revision or fine-tuning to philosophical analyses of discrimination. Philosophers have good reason to attend to the findings of social psychology: not only to gain an understanding of the mechanisms that may underpin discrimination, but also to inform philosophical analyses of discrimination and ensure that they are suitably formulated to capture the full range of the phenomenon. In the past couple of decades, social psychologists have focused on the measurement of 'implicit bias', or what is sometimes called 'aversive racism', or unconscious or automatic discrimination. Cases of implicit bias discrimination seem not to involve such clear beliefs or judgments that are taken to justify differential treatment. A domain of research in social psychology that is worth turning our attention to concerns the phenomenon known as 'stereotype threat'.
