According to BBC, the 2017 presidential election of Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton might have been due to a collective implicit bias against females. What do you think was the specific implicit bias against Hillary Clinton they were getting at with this claim?

Professor Tony Greenwald expected phone calls after hearing Hillary Clinton mention implicit bias during the first presidential debate. As if on cue, The New York Times and other media quickly contacted him for a quote.

Greenwald, UW professor of psychology, has been a leader in the study of implicit bias for decades. The term refers to attitudes and stereotypes that affect perception and judgment without our being aware of it.

To explore our implicit biases, Greenwald and Harvard colleague Mahzarin Banaji developed the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which has been taken online at Project Implicit’s educational site more than 20 million times since 1998. There are 14 versions of the test, looking at biases including race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, weight, and disability. There’s even an election version that measures unspoken support for US Presidential candidates. Greenwald and Banaji discuss the IAT and its findings in their 2013 book, Blindspot.

The format of the test is simple. Users quickly categorize images and words as they flash on the screen. When asked to combine words and images that might seem discordant — a picture of a wasp and the word “pleasure,” for example — there is often a delay in response time. That delay is an indicator of bias, and it persists even when the user knows what’s being tested. “As long as people cooperate with the instructions and do the tasks rapidly, the test is going to work, as it has for all these years,” says Greenwald.