Findings of implicit bias and its effects on clinical decisions may surprise physicians who tend to view their work as both altruistic and evidence-based.27 Implicit race biases are prevalent in the United States in general,26 and as such it should not be surprising that they are prevalent among physicians as well. The neural and cognitive processes underlying these biases are assumed to reflect both evolutionary bases and socially acquired orientations. The content of implicit biases(e.g., that black Americans are less cooperative than white Americans) are assumed to derive from sociocultural learning (e.g., explicit instruction and implicit messages) that accumulate over time. Implicit biases are primarily unconscious and do not imply overt racism. This is supported by the strong dissociation in the average level of expressed, explicit preferences and elicited, implicit ones, as well as the low correlation between explicit and implicit preference observed in this study. Critics of implicit measure of social cognition have asserted that such preferences and beliefs may reflect messages about the state of social groups in the larger culture but cannot be said to reflect an
