(Political Science) has been awarded a from the National Science Foundation to study implicit bias in the evaluation of public officials. The project hypothesizes that implicit bias could shape the evaluation of judges in judicial performance evaluations. Implicit bias mobilizes people's images of who should be holding a position, allowing non-normative people in a position to be evaluated more harshly because they do not fit a stereotype. People may unconsciously penalize judges who do not fit the normative image of a judge. They may frame their evaluations of certain characteristics such as courteousness, knowledge, and efficiency based on stereotypes, for example. Unconscious bias would result in lower scores for women and minority judges in judicial performance evaluations, regardless of the race and gender of their evaluators. The results of this study will contribute to understanding whether implicit bias could be a factor in assessing public officials.
