In this section, I demonstrate that there are two ways in which we might use technology to intervene on cognitive biases, and then assess the desirability of these interventions for facilitating knowledge acquisition. The first kind of intervention acts on the processes that produce distorted representations. The second acts on individual representations. We will consider them in that order.

Using this intervention, we would be able to form new beliefs while avoiding cognitive biases. However, one might now wonder exactly how much human is left in this extensive labyrinth of interfacing. 39 Suffice to say, this option constitutes a somewhat radical enhancement. It might be that in the future, humans will regularly use interfaces for a range of applications, and so this proposal will be more mundane for them than it seems to us now. Still there is another concern: the solution we have created here is rather inelegant. In ensuring that cognitive biases do not arise in the system, we have had to remove a significant part of what the system does well , only to bolt on a nonhuman module to meet the demand necessary to replicate those epistemically useful processes. Perhaps there is a less roundabout — and less radical — way to achieve the same effects.

It might be suggested that if the problem is that human processing capacities are limited, then the solution is to use the Heuristic Terminator in conjunction with another technological intervention that significantly augments processing capacity. This could occur through further interfacing in which processing is offloaded from the low‐capacity wetware and distributed across a much higher capacity artificial processor. Then, we would have a substantially upgraded processor to support the operations necessary for forming accurate representations without relying on heuristic processes.

It is unclear whether the Heuristic Terminator could differentiate a heuristic that typically delivers accurate cognitions from one that does not. If its instruction to the neural network is to terminate all heuristic processes and to demand that all representations are arrived at in a way that guarantees their reliability, then we might end up with a system that simply stops forming any further representations because the threshold for establishing an accurate representation of the world is too high to be met with existing cognitive resources. In that scenario, one would regularly find oneself unable to form new beliefs. So, interfacing with the Heuristic Terminator would likely be a rather uncomfortable and disorientating experience. We have not arrived at a place where knowledge acquisition is facilitated — quite the opposite. The Heuristic Terminator has created the ultimate skeptic.

It will be helpful at this point to consider why we tend to rely on heuristics and other cognitive shortcuts in the first place. Human information processing capacities are limited, but the information in our environment that is possibly relevant to cognition is extensive and far outweighs our processing capacity. Using heuristics enables us to more easily identify information that might be relevant and, moreover, enables us to terminate inquiry without having to consider every possibly relevant piece of information. It is likely that a vast quantity of human information processing relies on heuristics. 38

In principle, this all sounds good. However, once we start thinking more about how the Heuristic Terminator's software would work, together with the limitations of the existing “wet‐ware,” we run into some trouble. As we saw in 2.1, heuristic reasoning does not always result in distorted cognition. Sometimes it leads to further beliefs that do correspond with reality. Thus, it is not the case that terminating any heuristic process will kill off all and only the distorted cognitions. It may also result in the extinction of accurate representations.

Call the intervention described above the “Heuristic Terminator.” By intervening, halting, and redirecting the processes which generate cognitive biases, the Heuristic Terminator ensures that the neural network will not produce the distorted representations which, as we saw above, can thwart our acquisition of knowledge. Use of the Heuristic Terminator would thereby significantly enhance knowledge acquisition in a person who previously demonstrated a typical degree of cognitive bias, enabling them to avoid the distorted cognitions discussed in section 2.

Recall the discussion from section 1 in which technologies of a future neuroscience can interpret and interact with the representation of information across a neural network. This might occur via sophisticated neural‐interfacing implants (as in 1.1) that are able to scan the network's activity at a fine enough grain that software interfacing with the network can decode the representations and processes running on it. Let's also suppose that the interfacing device is able to manipulate representations and to halt, redirect, or initiate processes (as in 1.2). 37 Now, we can program our software to detect any process on the network that has resulted in a distorted representation (such as when the network utilizes a heuristic, or jumps to a conclusion that isn't properly supported by other representations in the network) and, via the interface, redirect the network to run processes that will result in a nondistorted representation instead.

3.2 Targeted Interventions

If heuristic processes in general bring epistemic benefits as well as costs, then perhaps a better arrangement than the Heuristic Terminator is an intervention that targets just those representations which, when recruited in processing, typically result in distorted cognitions. In fact, some cognitive scientists employ current technological interventions with the aim of achieving this targeted effect. A canonical example comes from a pioneer of research into implicit cognition, Mahzarin Banaji, who has made a screensaver that cycles through a thousand pictures of counterstereotypical images of people, with two main aims: (a) to combat stereotypical associations between concepts that are overemphasized by biased sources (for example, a media that overemphasizes the association between black people and criminality);40 and (b) to give her access to representations of people and their life experiences beyond the scope of her normal perspective. Her intention is that (a) enables her cognitive system to gradually uncouple stereotypical associations; while (b) allows her to instill new representations about people she would otherwise know little about, so that she is less likely to rely on inaccurate stereotypes of their life and experiences.41 Speaking of these sorts of interventions, Banaji says, “I no longer believe that I can just let information into my mind as it comes. I believe I must choose and edit.… I actually am pleased that the way technology now allows me to craft what I want to watch and listen to.”42 It has been pointed out that these sorts of interventions require continued effort and, even then, may not rid someone completely of a distorted representation. Neil Levy maintains that it remains “controversial” as to whether interventions like those suggested by Banaji enable the overwriting of distortions in a manner that is “relatively rapid” or “arduous, slow and extremely uncertain.”43 So, one might be interested in whether future technologies may enhance this effortful and uncertain process.

As introduced in 1.4, Hu and colleagues' developments in “selective erasure,” which aim to target particular associations in memory, might be the basis of one such intervention. As before, we can imagine that we are operating under a somewhat futuristic neuroscience, in which neural manipulation technology can search for specific associations between concepts, and can then selectively erase them, leaving accurate information regarding the concepts in question intact. Let's also imagine that our intervention is able to overwrite or implant new representations (as in Roy et al., also discussed in 1.4). Call this intervention the “Selective Manipulator.” Let's now consider how it might work.

Recall, Reeves's findings that people judge one and the same piece of writing to be more error‐ridden when they believe it to have been written by an African American person rather than by a white person.44 By selectively erasing the association linking African Americans and academic underachievement, the Selective Manipulator could prevent distorted judgments of the accuracy of writing perceived to be by African Americans from occurring in this case. The Selective Manipulator could also be used to target associations between women and academic underachievement to prevent the kind of distorted judgments discussed in section 2.2.45

The Selective Manipulator will be useful when it enables the deletion of a biased association that might otherwise become active in cognition to produce biased judgments. For instance, consider two teachers who harbor an association between the concepts male and rationality who are grading the quality of students' arguments. For the teacher whose association remains intact, that association is apt to distort their perception of argument quality (leading them to mark one and the same argument as of a higher quality when they believe it was written by a boy as compared to a girl), while this risk is removed for the teacher whose association has been selectively deleted. One might think that simply anonymizing student work produces the same result, but knowing who produced which piece of work while marking is pedagogically valuable, for it enables teachers to tailor the tone of their feedback (some students do better with frank, straightforward feedback, but for others this tone is not constructive).

We have so far considered associations between social identity and particular aptitudes. But what about cases in which teachers favor contributions that reflect the dominant culture and undervalue contributions that support nondominant cultures? For instance, in a politics class, a student raised with Western values, with an emphasis on individualism, might praise the individualistic aspects of a political system, while a student raised in a culture that places more emphasis on collectivism might criticize those aspects of a political system, and a Western teacher might unfairly undervalue the second student's contribution. While there is much empirical work on how associations regarding dominant social identity categories bias cognition, there is less on how dominant ideologies produce bias in cognition, and so it would be premature to make any claim regarding how the Selective Manipulator would work in these cases. If it turns out that dominant ideologies are, like social stereotypes, upheld through a series of discrete evaluations (in which, for example, facets of individualism are positively valanced while those of collectivism are negatively valanced), then it is possible that these may also be targeted by the Selective Manipulator. It could be that there is less public agreement on whether these cases count as bias because they may well be viewed through the lens of the dominant ideology; therefore, communication around such cases would need to be handled with care. But public pushback against current de‐biasing efforts is common, and managing this is another practical issue to be considered before using the Selective Manipulator.46

Not everyone may support the use of the Selective Manipulator. For instance, those who espouse the “mirror view” of the above attitudes might object that this use of the Selective Manipulator will not have the intended epistemically beneficial outcomes. According to the mirror view, social biases are not really biases at all, but reflect real‐life propensities. Nilanjana Dasgupta, for instance, suggests that implicit attitudes are “mirror‐like reflections of local environments and communities within which individuals are immersed,” and that “[t]hrough repetition, these observations get passively recorded in the mind and become the basis of implicit attitudes and beliefs.”47 For instance, African Americans do underachieve in some educational settings as compared with white people, and it is this fact that causes an association with underachievement, but social, economic, and political factors (such as reduced access to education and financial resources) explain this underachievement.48 Nonetheless, for proponents of the mirror view, reality is reflected in a cognition that links African Americans with underachievement.49 Following the mirror view, Tamar Szabó Gendler has argued that implicit social attitudes aren't really biases at all because they reflect real‐world propensities and, further, that in rejecting them, one loses important accurate representations of the world.50 If this is right, then from an epistemic point of view, these cognitions ought to be preserved after all.

However, a number of other philosophers have argued that the situation is more nuanced than the mirror view would have it. Alex Madva, for instance, maintains that the mirror view is “a radically oversimplified and misleading gloss on the psychology of prejudice,” pointing to evidence that our social representations of the world are partly reinforced and maintained by the way we want to see the world.51 For instance, one study shows that men were more critical of findings indicating a bias against hiring women in science, while women were more critical of findings indicating an absence of such a bias.52 In short, confirmation bias, driven by the desire to, for instance, downplay the structural benefits that have given one advantages over members of another group, feeds and maintains our implicit social biases.

Further, one might hold something like a mirror view of implicit associations, but argue that use of the Selective Manipulator is nevertheless epistemically recommended. Katherine Puddifoot maintains that even if our implicit social attitudes do reflect real‐world propensities (for example, associating science with men simply because there are more prominent male scientists than female scientists), their tendency to feature in so much other processing that results in further distorted cognition outweighs the epistemic benefit of reflecting real‐world propensities.53 For instance, an association between black people and underachievement may reflect reality, but it is apt to be activated automatically by stimuli evoking black people and to generate distorted judgments in instances where this association should not have any normative force. Even if it is true that black people tend to underperform in some academic pursuits compared with people from other racial backgrounds, that is not a reason for seeing more errors in one and the same piece of writing when it is associated with a black author compared to a white author — and yet, that is what people believe they see, constituting a real risk for perpetuating stereotypes in educational settings.54 For this reason, Puddifoot argues, the epistemic benefits of maintaining the association are outweighed by these downstream epistemic costs, and so we would do better epistemically if we rejected the association. Accordingly, the epistemic considerations that motivate the mirror view (reflecting reality) may still be compatible with the use of the Selective Manipulator.

While I am convinced by Madva's and Puddifoot's arguments that the epistemic characteristics of implicit biases are not exhausted by pointing to the ways in which they reflect society, I am also sympathetic to a concern raised by many who espouse the mirror view: that the relevant social stereotypes are connected to deep and pervasive structural issues that we should not lose sight of in discussions of cognitive bias.55 This concern may well count against the use of the Selective Manipulator as a method to extinguish implicit social biases in favor of advancing learning — or, at least, it requires that the Manipulator be used in conjunction with other resources to mitigate this potential. If the Selective Manipulator allows users to effectively delete their biases without acknowledging their content, their source, or their part in perpetuating structural injustices, then it takes away an important opportunity to engage learners and educators with the aim of facilitating their recognition of the structures that constrain the trajectories of knowledge acquisition.

Consider again Reeves's finding that a piece of writing is evaluated more harshly when participants believe the author is African American than when they think the author is white.56 In these sorts of judgments, the manifestation of the association is inappropriate, but participants harbor this association in part because African American students generally do underachieve in comparison with white peers — yet, this attainment gap exists due to historical structural injustices that deprive African American communities of resources necessary to develop academic success.57 The association itself does not contain information about the historical structural injustice that explains the achievement differential. Nevertheless, confronting the fact that one harbors negative associations about African Americans presents an opportunity to deepen one's understanding of these structural issues. This could prove particularly important for teachers. In this case, it contextualizes and justifies the provision of support to African American students. Extinguishing the relevant association through application of the Selective Manipulator removes this pedagogically significant opportunity.

Even Sally Haslanger, who cautions against expending too many philosophical resources on the discussion of the cognitive aspects of bias, points out that “drawing attention to implicit bias can be strategically useful as a starting point for discussion of social injustice because there is empirical evidence to support the claim that we are all biased.”58 But with the Selective Manipulator, the opportunity for discussion does not necessarily arise, and so we miss out on discussing important structural issues.

This potential outcome does not require that we forgo any use of the Selective Manipulator — it still might be the most effective method for preventing the distorted cognitions that thwart educational goals, as discussed in 2.2. But we should act to preserve the opportunity to turn attention to unjust structures that freely accompanies traditional implicit bias interventions. In order to preserve these pedagogically important opportunities, I propose that the Selective Manipulator be designed such that it both requires users to confront the content of their biases, as well as how they have figured in cognition, and simultaneously provides them with information about the wider social and historical context, inviting them to engage with it and consider how it relates to their biases.