Governor Mike Pence hasn't always seen eye to eye with scientific consensus. He has argued that smoking doesn’t kill, written that global warming is a myth, and advocated for public funding of conversion therapy programs for LGBT people.

Now, Pence is in trouble with another subset of the scientific community—psychologists. During Tuesday night's vice presidential debate, Pence chastised Hillary Clinton for saying during the first Presidential debate that police officers have implicit racial biases that may have fatal consequences. "Enough of this seeking every opportunity to demean law enforcement broadly by making the accusation of implicit bias every time tragedy occurs," Pence said.

But researchers who have been studying implicit bias say Pence gets this wrong. In fact, he missed the most important part. It’s not demeaning at all to point out implicit bias. That's the whole idea: The people who study implicit bias say just about everybody has it, to some degree, and pointing it out may be the first, best step to beating it. "Those of us working on this issue have made great progress getting beyond the blame game—making it clear that implicit bias is not the same as 'racism,' that its effects are, by definition, unintentional," says Jack Glaser, a psychologist at UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy. "It's a shame that a national figure would push the discourse backward."

Pence was trying to stake out political ground. But he was also confusing implicit bias—an unconscious but measurable response—with explicit bias, ugly and overt racism or sexism. "Implicit bias doesn't make us bad people," says Alexis McGill Johnson, executive director of the Perception Institute, which studies why bias exists and what to do about it. "It makes us human."

Disseminating this message has been critical to getting schools, police departments, and workplaces to institute implicit bias training in recent years. The White House has been pushing for such training in both the business world and the criminal justice field, and Clinton has been talking about it on the campaign trail.

But conservative leaders are pushing back. One recent National Review article said that discussing implicit bias "gets very sinister, very quickly" because it "allows radicals to indict entire communities as bigoted, it relieves them of the obligation of actually proving their case, and it allows them to use virtually any negative event as a pretext for enforcing their ideological agenda."

That's not necessarily wrong. Implicit bias may not be the root of every societal ill, and assuming bias in every person's every statement might not be the clearest path to mutual understanding. But that doesn't mean police departments and employers are wrong to take steps to curb it. Facebook recently published its own course on managing bias for other businesses to use, and law enforcement agencies across the country hire people like McGill Johnson to lead theirs. "Something that's been starting to become fairly well-understood has actually become distorted by Pence’s statement," she says.

Implicit Bias Research Goes Back Decades

In 1998, a group of researchers from Harvard, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia developed the implicit association test, a word-association test that measures how a subject matches positive or negative words with subgroups of people. The version of the test aimed at race, for instance, measures how quickly someone can, say, match black faces that appear on screen with positive words versus negative ones. The easier it is to match black faces with negative words, the researchers assert, the more your implicit bias reveals itself. One Pew Research study using the IAT found that 48 percent of white respondents exhibited slight to strong bias toward white people, while 45 percent of black respondents showed a slight to strong bias toward black people.

Pew Research Center

This test, of course, has not been without controversy. It makes broad claims about the deep-seated beliefs of broad swaths of people, and not everyone is convinced that its measurements are accurate, least of all Hart Blanton, a social psychologist at the University of Connecticut. Blanton doesn't deny that implicit bias exists, but he says the IAT's measurements can be wildly inconsistent over time.

"In general, researchers are comfortable with the idea implicit bias is a problem and word needs to get out," he says. "But people aren't stopping to critically examine the measurement foundations of this research enterprise."

Blanton believes that implicit bias research moved too swiftly from science to advocacy, making it tough for people like him to publicly interrogate the science. When Pence—or Clinton—brings it up in a debate, it makes it even tougher. "Now, important questions that scientists have to think critically about and in complex ways have become part of the culture wars," he says. "Scientists who really care about these matters are going to have to do their best to rise above the noise."

Implicit Bias Is An Everyone Problem

In the debate, Pence pursued the issue further—and made another critical interpretive mistake. "When African-American police officers are involved in a police action shooting involving an African-American, why would Hillary Clinton accuse that African-American police officer of implicit bias?" he asked Senator Tim Kaine, Clinton's running mate. But that question assumes people think only white people have implicit bias. People in the field tend to think everyone has it, to some degree.

Of course, Pence was specifically talking about police departments, where there's ample evidence of implicit bias. In simulation games, for example, police officers are more likely to mistakenly shoot unarmed black suspects than they are unarmed white suspects. "The question is not whether police have implicit biases. That is a certainty," says Glaser. "The question is, what can be done about it, given that police have extraordinary power over others' lives?"

The answer, as it turns out, is quite a lot. And this is where Kaine missed some aspects of this issue, because he failed to point this out during the debate. "He should have been saying not only does it exist, but we have some real concrete solutions in these areas," McGill Johnson says. In fact, some of the same research that shows police officers are more likely to shoot black suspects in simulation games also shows that the more officers play those games, the less likely they are to accidentally shoot the black subjects. People display less implicit bias after being exposed to counter-stereotypes; so-called intergroup contact, in which one group of people familiarizes itself with another, has the same effect. That makes a strong case for the type of community policing methods that both Kaine and Pence support, in which police get to know the people living in whatever neighborhoods they patrol.

Even here, though, things get complicated. Not all training works the way it's supposed to. Blanton points out that in certain cases making people aware of their own biases can backfire, causing them to fixate on those biases instead. But at least researchers are looking at the problem squarely; politicians would be wise to do the same.