Cultural Snapshots

Racial inequality persists in modern American society and permeates domains ranging from healthcare to education. Scientists typically trace such racial inequality to implicit (rather than explicit) racial bias, and some argue that implicit racial bias is better understood as a contextual or cultural variable rather than as an individual difference variable. Here, this body of work is expanded by highlighting a method—cultural snapshots—for identifying contextual patterns of information that explain and facilitate socially situated implicit racial bias. Cultural snapshots enable scientists to (a) characterize the cultural information commonly and frequently encountered by a collective, (b) examine how such cultural information influences the cognitions of individuals, and (c) draw conclusions about the emergence of shared cognition. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some ways this approach could be applied to other types of cultural patterns and the benefits of examining implicit racial bias at a cultural level more broadly.