32 found
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  1. Understanding Implicit Bias: Putting the Criticism into Perspective.Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva & Bertram Gawronski - 2020 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 101 (2):276-307.
    What is the status of research on implicit bias? In light of meta‐analyses revealing ostensibly low average correlations between implicit measures and behavior, as well as various other psychometric concerns, criticism has become ubiquitous. We argue that while there are significant challenges and ample room for improvement, research on the causes, psychological properties, and behavioral effects of implicit bias continues to deserve a role in the sciences of the mind as well as in efforts to understand, and ultimately combat, discrimination (...)
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  2. Individualism, Structuralism, and Climate Change.Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva & Daniel Kelly - 2021 - Environmental Communication 1.
    Scholars, journalists, and activists working on climate change often distinguish between “individual” and “structural” approaches to decarbonization. The former concern choices individuals can make to reduce their “personal carbon footprint” (e.g., eating less meat). The latter concern changes to institutions, laws, and other social structures. These two approaches are often framed as oppositional, representing a mutually exclusive forced choice between alternative routes to decarbonization. After presenting representative samples of this oppositional framing of individual and structural approaches in environmental communication, we (...)
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  3. Biased against Debiasing: On the Role of (Institutionally Sponsored) Self-Transformation in the Struggle against Prejudice.Alex Madva - 2017 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 4:145-179.
    Research suggests that interventions involving extensive training or counterconditioning can reduce implicit prejudice and stereotyping, and even susceptibility to stereotype threat. This research is widely cited as providing an “existence proof” that certain entrenched social attitudes are capable of change, but is summarily dismissed—by philosophers, psychologists, and activists alike—as lacking direct, practical import for the broader struggle against prejudice, discrimination, and inequality. Criticisms of these “debiasing” procedures fall into three categories: concerns about empirical efficacy, about practical feasibility, and about the (...)
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  4. Why implicit attitudes are (probably) not beliefs.Alex Madva - 2016 - Synthese 193 (8).
    Should we understand implicit attitudes on the model of belief? I argue that implicit attitudes are (probably) members of a different psychological kind altogether, because they seem to be insensitive to the logical form of an agent’s thoughts and perceptions. A state is sensitive to logical form only if it is sensitive to the logical constituents of the content of other states (e.g., operators like negation and conditional). I explain sensitivity to logical form and argue that it is a necessary (...)
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  5. What do implicit measures measure?Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva & Bertram Gawronski - 2019 - WIREs Cognitive Science:1-13.
    We identify several ongoing debates related to implicit measures, surveying prominent views and considerations in each debate. First, we summarize the debate regarding whether performance on implicit measures is explained by conscious or unconscious representations. Second, we discuss the cognitive structure of the operative constructs: are they associatively or propositionally structured? Third, we review debates whether performance on implicit measures reflects traits or states. Fourth, we discuss the question of whether a person’s performance on an implicit measure reflects characteristics of (...)
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  6. Individual and Structural Interventions.Alex Madva - 2020 - In Erin Beeghly & Alex Madva (eds.), An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind. New York, NY, USA: Routledge.
    What can we do—and what should we do—to fight against bias? This final chapter introduces empirically-tested interventions for combating implicit (and explicit) bias and promoting a fairer world, from small daily-life debiasing tricks to larger structural interventions. Along the way, this chapter raises a range of moral, political, and strategic questions about these interventions. This chapter further stresses the importance of admitting that we don’t have all the answers. We should be humble about how much we still don’t know and (...)
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  7. Virtue, Social Knowledge, and Implicit Bias.Alex Madva - 2016 - In Michael Brownstein & Jennifer Mather Saul (eds.), Implicit Bias and Philosophy, Volume 1: Metaphysics and Epistemology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 191-215.
    This chapter is centered around an apparent tension that research on implicit bias raises between virtue and social knowledge. Research suggests that simply knowing what the prevalent stereotypes are leads individuals to act in prejudiced ways—biasing decisions about whom to trust and whom to ignore, whom to promote and whom to imprison—even if they reflectively reject those stereotypes. Because efforts to combat discrimination obviously depend on knowledge of stereotypes, a question arises about what to do next. This chapter argues that (...)
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  8. Stereotypes, Conceptual Centrality and Gender Bias: An Empirical Investigation.Guillermo Del Pinal, Alex Madva & Kevin Https://Orcidorg Reuter - 2017 - Ratio 30 (4):384-410.
    Discussions in social psychology overlook an important way in which biases can be encoded in conceptual representations. Most accounts of implicit bias focus on ‘mere associations’ between features and representations of social groups. While some have argued that some implicit biases must have a richer conceptual structure, they have said little about what this richer structure might be. To address this lacuna, we build on research in philosophy and cognitive science demonstrating that concepts represent dependency relations between features. These relations, (...)
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  9. Change the People or Change the Policy? On the Moral Education of Antiracists.Alex Madva, Daniel Kelly & Michael Brownstein - 2023 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 1 (1):1-20.
    While those who take a "structuralist" approach to racial justice issues are right to call attention to the importance of social practices, laws, etc., they sometimes go too far by suggesting that antiracist efforts ought to focus on changing unjust social systems rather than changing individuals’ minds. We argue that while the “either/or” thinking implied by this framing is intuitive and pervasive, it is misleading and self-undermining. We instead advocate for a “both/and” approach to antiracist moral education that explicitly teaches (...)
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  10. Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility.Alex Madva - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (S1):53-78.
    Are individuals morally responsible for their implicit biases? One reason to think not is that implicit biases are often advertised as unconscious, ‘introspectively inaccessible’ attitudes. However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, although often in partial and inarticulate ways. Here I explore the implications of this evidence of partial awareness for individuals’ moral responsibility. First, I argue that responsibility comes in degrees. Second, I argue that individuals’ partial awareness of their implicit biases makes (...)
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  11. Integration, Community, and the Medical Model of Social Injustice.Alex Madva - 2019 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 37 (2):211-232.
    I defend an empirically-oriented approach to the analysis and remediation of social injustice. My springboard for this argument is a debate—principally represented here between Tommie Shelby and Elizabeth Anderson, but with much deeper historical roots and many flowering branches—about whether racial-justice advocacy should prioritize integration (bringing different groups together) or community development (building wealth and political power within the black community). Although I incline toward something closer to Shelby’s “egalitarian pluralist” approach over Anderson’s single-minded emphasis on integration, many of Shelby’s (...)
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  12. Social Psychology, Phenomenology, and the Indeterminate Content of Unreflective Racial Bias.Alex Madva - 2019 - In Emily S. Lee (ed.), Race as Phenomena: Between Phenomenology and Philosophy of Race. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. pp. 87-106.
    Social psychologists often describe “implicit” racial biases as entirely unconscious, and as mere associations between groups and traits, which lack intentional content, e.g., we associate “black” and “athletic” in much the same way we associate “salt” and “pepper.” However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, albeit in partial, inarticulate, or even distorted ways. Moreover, evidence suggests that implicit biases are not “dumb” semantic associations, but instead reflect our skillful, norm-sensitive, and embodied engagement with (...)
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  13. Intersectionality as a Regulative Ideal.Katherine Gasdaglis & Alex Madva - 2019 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 6.
    Appeals to intersectionality serve to remind us that social categories like race and gender cannot be adequately understood independently from each other. But what, exactly, is the intersectional thesis a thesis about? Answers to this question are remarkably diverse. Intersectionality is variously understood as a claim about the nature of social kinds, oppression, or experience ; about the limits of antidiscrimination law or identity politics ; or about the importance of fuzzy sets, multifactor analysis, or causal modeling in social science.
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  14. Black Lives Matter and the Call for Death Penalty Abolition.Michael Cholbi & Alex Madva - 2018 - Ethics 128 (3):517-544.
    The Black Lives Matter movement has called for the abolition of capital punishment in response to what it calls “the war against Black people” and “Black communities.” This article defends the two central contentions in the movement’s abolitionist stance: first, that US capital punishment practices represent a wrong to black communities rather than simply a wrong to particular black capital defendants or particular black victims of murder, and second, that the most defensible remedy for this wrong is the abolition of (...)
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  15. Introducing Implicit Bias: Why this Book Matters.Erin Beeghly & Alex Madva - 2020 - In Erin Beeghly & Alex Madva (eds.), An Introduction to Implicit Bias: Knowledge, Justice, and the Social Mind. New York, NY, USA: Routledge. pp. 1-19.
    Written by a diverse range of scholars, this accessible introductory volume asks: What is implicit bias? How does implicit bias compromise our knowledge of others and social reality? How does implicit bias affect us, as individuals and participants in larger social and political institutions, and what can we do to combat biases? An interdisciplinary enterprise, the volume brings together the philosophical perspective of the humanities with the perspective of the social sciences to develop rich lines of inquiry. It is written (...)
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  16. Resistance Training.Alex Madva - 2020 - The Philosophers' Magazine 91:40-45.
    The summer of 2020 witnessed perhaps the largest protests in American history in response to police and vigilante brutality against the black community. New protests are still erupting every time another suppressed video, such as of Daniel Prude, surfaces, or another killing, such as Breonna Taylor’s, goes unpunished. As communities demand meaningful reform, the point – or pointlessness – of “implicit bias training” takes on renewed urgency. Implicit bias trainings aim to raise awareness about the unwitting or unwilling prejudices and (...)
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  17. The Inevitability of Aiming for Virtue.Alex Madva - 2019 - In Benjamin R. Sherman & Stacey Goguen (eds.), Overcoming Epistemic Injustice: Social and Psychological Perspectives. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. pp. 85-100.
    I defend Fricker’s virtue-theoretic proposals for grappling with epistemic injustice, arguing that her account is both empirically oriented and plausible. I agree with Fricker that an integral component of what we ought to do in the face of pervasive epistemic injustice is working to cultivate epistemic habits that aim to consistently neutralize the effects of such prejudices on their credibility estimates. But Fricker does not claim that her specific proposals constitute the only means through which individuals and institutions should combat (...)
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  18. Can Capital Punishment Survive if Black Lives Matter?Michael Cholbi & Alex Madva - 2021 - In Michael Cholbi, Brandon Hogan, Alex Madva & Benjamin S. Yost (eds.), The Movement for Black Lives: Philosophical Perspectives. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Usa.
    Drawing upon empirical studies of racial discrimination dating back to the 1940’s, the Movement for Black Lives platform calls for the abolition of capital punishment. Our purpose here is to defend the Movement’s call for death penalty abolition in terms congruent with its claim that the death penalty in the U.S. is a “racist practice” that “devalues Black lives.” We first sketch the jurisprudential history of race and capital punishment in the U.S., wherein courts have occasionally expressed worries about racial (...)
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  19. Stop me if you've heard this one before: The Chomskyan hammer and the Skinnerian nail.Alex Madva - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:52-54.
    This piece is a comment on Quilty-Dunn, Jake, Nicolas Porot, and Eric Mandelbaum. 2023. “The Best Game in Town: The Reemergence of the Language-of-Thought Hypothesis across the Cognitive Sciences.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46: e261. -/- The target article signal boosts important ongoing work across the cognitive sciences. However, its theoretical claims, generative value, and purported contributions are – where not simply restatements of arguments extensively explored elsewhere – imprecise, noncommittal, and underdeveloped to a degree that makes them difficult to (...)
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  20. Duties of social identity? Intersectional objections to Sen’s identity politics.Alex Madva, Katherine Gasdaglis & Shannon Doberneck - 2023 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy:1-31.
    Amartya Sen argues that sectarian discord and violence are fueled by confusion about the nature of identity, including the pervasive tendency to see ourselves as members of singular social groups standing in opposition to other groups (e.g. Democrat vs. Republican, Muslim vs. Christian, etc.). Sen defends an alternative model of identity, according to which we all inevitably belong to a plurality of discrete identity groups (including ethnicities, classes, genders, races, religions, careers, hobbies, etc.) and are obligated to choose, in any (...)
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  21. It's always both: Changing individuals requires changing systems and changing systems requires changing individuals.Alex Madva, Michael Brownstein & Daniel Kelly - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e168.
    S-frames and i-frames do not represent two opposed types of intervention. Rather they are interpretive lenses for focusing on specific aspects of interventions, all of which include individual and structural dimensions. There is no sense to be made of prioritizing either system change or individual change, because each requires the other.
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  22. The Longitudinal Effects of STEM Identity and Gender on Flourishing and Achievement in College Physics.Viviane Seyranian, Alex Madva, Nina Abramzon, Nicole Duong, Yoi Tibbetts & Judith Harackiewicz - 2018 - International Journal of STEM Education 5 (40):1-14.
    Background. Drawing on social identity theory and positive psychology, this study investigated women’s responses to the social environment of physics classrooms. It also investigated STEM identity and gender disparities on academic achievement and flourishing in an undergraduate introductory physics course for STEM majors. 160 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory physics course were administered a baseline survey with self-report measures on course belonging, physics identification, flourishing, and demographics at the beginning of the course and a post-survey at the end of (...)
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  23. Equal Rights for Zombies?: Phenomenal Consciousness and Responsible Agency.Alex Madva - 2019 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (5-6):117-40.
    Intuitively, moral responsibility requires conscious awareness of what one is doing, and why one is doing it, but what kind of awareness is at issue? Neil Levy argues that phenomenal consciousness—the qualitative feel of conscious sensations—is entirely unnecessary for moral responsibility. He claims that only access consciousness—the state in which information (e.g., from perception or memory) is available to an array of mental systems (e.g., such that an agent can deliberate and act upon that information)—is relevant to moral responsibility. I (...)
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  24. How Should We Think About Implicit Measures and Their Empirical “Anomalies”?Bertram Gawronski, Michael Brownstein & Alex Madva - 2022 - WIREs Cognitive Science:1-7.
    Based on a review of several “anomalies” in research using implicit measures, Machery (2021) dismisses the modal interpretation of participant responses on implicit measures and, by extension, the value of implicit measures. We argue that the reviewed findings are anomalies only for specific—influential but long-contested—accounts that treat responses on implicit measures as uncontaminated indicators of trait-like unconscious representations that coexist with functionally independent conscious representations. However, the reviewed findings are to-be-expected “normalities” when viewed from the perspective of long-standing alternative frameworks (...)
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  25. Shadowboxing with Social Justice Warriors. A Review of Endre Begby’s Prejudice: A Study in Non-Ideal Epistemology.Alex Madva - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology.
    Endre Begby’s Prejudice: A Study in Non-Ideal Epistemology engages a wide range of issues of enduring interest to epistemologists, applied ethicists, and anyone concerned with how knowledge and justice intersect. Topics include stereotypes and generics, evidence and epistemic justification, epistemic injustice, ethical-epistemic dilemmas, moral encroachment, and the relations between blame and accountability. Begby applies his views about these topics to an equally wide range of pressing social questions, such as conspiracy theories, misinformation, algorithmic bias, discrimination, and criminal justice. Through it (...)
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  26. Taking social psychology out of context.Michael Brownstein, Daniel Kelly & Alex Madva - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:26-27.
    We endorse Cesario's call for more research into the complexities of “real-world” decisions and the comparative power of different causes of group disparities. Unfortunately, these reasonable suggestions are overshadowed by a barrage of non sequiturs, misdirected criticisms of methodology, and unsubstantiated claims about the assumptions and inferences of social psychologists.
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  27. STEM Faculty’s Support of Togetherness during Mandated Separation: Accommodations, Caring, Crisis Management, and Powerlessness.Ian Thacker, Viviane Seyranian, Alex Madva & Paul Beardsley - 2022 - Education Sciences 12 (9):1-14.
    The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic initiated major disruptions to higher education systems. Physical spaces that previously supported interpersonal interaction and community were abruptly inactivated, and faculty largely took on the responsibility of accommodating classroom structures in rapidly changing situations. This study employed interviews to examine how undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) instructors adapted instruction to accommodate the mandated transition to virtual learning and how these accommodations supported or hindered community and belonging during the onset of the pandemic. (...)
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  28. Implicit Bias.Alex Madva - 2020 - In Hugh LaFollette (ed.), Ethics in Practice: An Anthology (5th Edition). Wiley-Blackwell.
    (This contribution is primarily based on "Implicit Bias, Moods, and Moral Responsibility," (2018) Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. This version has been shortened and significantly revised to be more accessible and student-oriented.) Are individuals morally responsible for their implicit biases? One reason to think not is that implicit biases are often advertised as unconscious. However, recent empirical evidence consistently suggests that individuals are aware of their implicit biases, although often in partial and inarticulate ways. Here I explore the implications of this evidence (...)
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  29. (What) Are Stereotyping and Discrimination? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?Alex Madva - 2021 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 10 (11):43-51.
    Comment on Beeghly, Erin. 2021. “Stereotyping as Discrimination: Why Thoughts Can Be Discriminatory.” Social Epistemology 35 (6): 547–63. -/- Beeghly’s “Stereotyping as Discrimination” is—characteristically—clear, thorough, and persuasive, rich with incisive arguments and thought-provoking case studies. In defending the view that stereotyping often constitutes discrimination, she makes a powerful case that, “Living ethically means cultivating a certain kind of ‘inner’ life and avoiding pernicious habits of thought, no matter how culturally pervasive” (Beeghly 2021b, 13). Support for such claims is traced back (...)
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  30. Social Connectedness in Physical Isolation: Online Teaching Practices That Support Under-Represented Undergraduate Students’ Feelings of Belonging and Engagement in STEM.Ian Thacker, Viviane Seyranian, Alex Madva, Nicole T. Duong & Paul Beardsley - 2022 - Education Sciences 12 (2):61-82.
    The COVID-19 outbreak spurred unplanned closures and transitions to online classes. Physical environments that once fostered social interaction and community were rendered inactive. We conducted interviews and administered surveys to examine undergraduate STEM students’ feelings of belonging and engagement while in physical isolation, and identified online teaching modes associated with these feelings. Surveys from a racially diverse group of 43 undergraduate students at a Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) revealed that interactive synchronous instruction was positively associated with feelings of interest and (...)
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  31. From Falsehood to Truth, and From Truth to Error. [REVIEW]Alex Madva - 2023 - Analysis 83 (2):405-416.
    Critical notice of Puddifoot, Katherine. 2021. How Stereotypes Deceive Us. NY: OUP.--------- -/- Kathy Puddifoot makes a compelling and enlightening case for a striking pair of claims: 1) false stereotypes sometimes steer us to the truth, while 2) true stereotypes often lead us into error. This is a wonderful book, a seamless integration of epistemology with ethics, of philosophy with social science, and of “mainstream” or “Western analytic” approaches with marginalized and underappreciated contributions from critical social traditions, especially black feminism. (...)
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  32. The Social Turn in Moral Psychology. [REVIEW]Alex Madva - 2019 - Philosophical Review 128 (1):116-121.
    (This is a book review of Mark Fedyk's The Social Turn in Moral Psychology.) Mark Fedyk argues persuasively for both the importance and the perils of interdisciplinarity in studies of ethical life. The book is dense with incisive argumentation and innovative proposals for integrating moral, social, and political philosophy with the psychological and social sciences. It will be of interest to aprioristically inclined normative and social theorists peeking over the fence at the empirical side of things, to experimentalists trying to (...)
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