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- Title
Implicit racial biases are lower in more populous more diverse and less segregated US cities.
- Authors
Stier, Andrew J.; Sajjadi, Sina; Karimi, Fariba; Bettencourt, Luís M. A.; Berman, Marc G.
- Abstract
Implicit biases - differential attitudes towards members of distinct groups - are pervasive in human societies and create inequities across many aspects of life. Recent research has revealed that implicit biases are generally driven by social contexts, but not whether they are systematically influenced by the ways that humans self-organize in cities. We leverage complex system modeling in the framework of urban scaling theory to predict differences in these biases between cities. Our model links spatial scales from city-wide infrastructure to individual psychology to predict that cities that are more populous, more diverse, and less segregated are less biased. We find empirical support for these predictions in U.S. cities with Implicit Association Test data spanning a decade from 2.7 million individuals and U.S. Census demographic data. Additionally, we find that changes in cities' social environments precede changes in implicit biases at short time-scales, but this relationship is bi-directional at longer time-scales. We conclude that the social organization of cities may influence the strength of these biases. Implicit biases are influenced by social contexts which, in cities, are shaped by the constraints of urban infrastructure networks. Here the authors show that more populous, more diverse, and less segregated cities are less biased and that this is predicted by a complex systems model.
- Subjects
CITIES &; towns; IMPLICIT bias; RACISM; ADLERIAN psychology; INFRASTRUCTURE (Economics); SPATIAL data infrastructures; EUGENICS
- Publication
Nature Communications, 2024, Vol 15, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
2041-1723
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/s41467-024-45013-8