U of I study reports global decrease in explicit bias

Yahoo

09-04-2025

CHAMPAIGN-URBANA, Ill. (WCIA) — A study by University of Illinois researchers found that self-reported bias, or explicit bias, has decreased globally. Implicit — or automatic — bias has seen a bit more variation over the years.
The researchers tracked explicit and implicit bias against stigmatized groups in 33 countries between 2009 to 2019. The categories they looked at included race, body weight, skin tone and sexuality.
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University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign psychology professor Benedek Kurdi led the research along with Tessa Charlesworth, a professor in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
'We used data from Project Implicit, a website established in the early 2000s that serves both as a venue to educate people about implicit processes and as a site for collecting data,' Kurdi said.
People are aware of their explicit biases towards groups or individuals. Implicit biases, however, may be hidden. To understand a person's implicit biases, researchers may have a person take on a task, while performing a behavior.
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For example, a research participant may be tasked with categorizing images and words and analyzing how quickly they accomplish this can allow researchers to make inferences about their implicit biases. Kurdi said this is because there is less of a chance for the research participant to control their responses.
After analyzing data from participants in the U.S., previous studies found that self-reported bias against stigmatized groups has been going down. U.S. research participants have expressed less anti-old/pro-young, anti-fat/pro-thin, anti-gay/pro-straight, anti-dark skin/pro-light skin and anti-Black/pro-white attitudes since 2007.
Implicit bias for some stigmatized groups has also been trending down in the U.S.
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'Specifically, implicit sexuality attitudes dropped in bias by 65% and are now close to neutrality. Implicit race and skin tone attitudes have also [showed declines in bias], although at slower but still notable rates of 26% and 25%, respectively,' the researchers said.
For body weight and age, however, implicit bias remained high in the U.S.
When comparing U.S. trends to global data, the researchers found results that were similar, but with a couple of key differences.
'We looked at self-reported bias against age, body weight, sexuality, skin tone and race,' Kurdi said. 'And for every single one of them, people are reporting less bias, and they are reporting more egalitarian social group attitudes. But then when you look at implicit attitudes, there is a lot more variability.'
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Between 2009 to 2019, self-reported bias fell internationally, between 18% to 43% for each of the stigmatized groups that the researchers focused on.
Implicit bias varied a bit more, however. Implicit bias related to sexuality dropped 36%, and age, race and body weight stayed pretty much the same. Implicit bias related to skin tone decreased, but then later increased by about 20% overall between 2009 to 2019.
Kurdi said that a key finding is that explicit and implicit bias are malleable. And he noted that the most dramatic reductions in bias — in the U.S. and abroad — were related to sexuality.
'It's not just that the average is changing, but almost every single country in the dataset changed toward less bias in sexuality attitudes,' Kurdi said. 'This is likely the result of several factors, including social movements, people coming out, and the fact that representation of gay people has become both more frequent and more diverse in media.'
For more details on the study, you can find the research paper online.
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