Implicit memory reveals implicit bias in humans and machines.

Abstract

In homage to Larry Jacoby, this autobiographical and empirical account traces the intellectual lineage of research on implicit social cognition from its origins in research on implicit memory and the serendipitous discovery of a bias without awareness. This result redirected the author's scholarly attention to the hidden presence of social categories in judgment. Tracing major theoretical and methodological advances in early work on implicit social cognition, mid-period convergent evidence from neuroimaging and developmental origins in childhood, the paper ends with recent computational analyses of natural language, and the discovery of human-like biases in large language models. Together, the work highlights an enduring discovery - the frequent dissociation between explicit and implicit cognition in humans and machines. This discovery, that bias is routinely hidden from introspective access, reveals unintended hypocrisy in carbon and silicon minds whose consequences for fairness and justice remain unaddressed.