Prince Harry has spoken of how “unconscious bias” can affect racism, saying that many people fail to acknowledge their own bias due to their upbringing and environment.

The Duke of Sussex made the remarks during an interview with conservationist and primatologist Jane Goodall.

He also spoke of his fears for the future of the planet, and that he and his wife planned to have a maximum of two children. Their first child, Archie, was born in May.

In the interview, printed in the September edition of British Vogue magazine which was guest-edited by the Duchess of Sussex, he and Goodall discuss how humans should live in harmony with the natural world, and aim to leave something better behind for the next generation.

Praising her work, and its focus on the younger generation, he said: “[When] you start to peel away all the layers, all the taught behaviour, the learned behaviour, the experienced behaviour … at the end of the day, we’re all humans.”

Goodall said: “Especially if you get little kids together, there’s no difference. They don’t notice: ‘my skin’s white, mine’s black’ until somebody tells them.”

Harry said: “But again, just as stigma is handed down from generation to generation, your perspective on the world and on life and on people is something that is taught to you. It’s learned from your family, learned from the older generation, or from advertising, from your environment.”

Q&A What is unconscious bias? Show Unconscious or implicit bias is one part of the explanation for why, despite equalities being enshrined in law, minority groups are still at a disadvantage in many parts of life. The term was popularised after US social psychologists devised a way of measuring the prejudices that we are not necessarily aware of – the Implicit Association Test. They published a paper in 1998 claiming that their tool for measuring "the unconscious roots of prejudice" showed that 90-95% of people were susceptible. While the reliability of that test is now contested, there is overwhelming wider evidence that unconscious bias seeps into decisions that affect recruitment, access to healthcare and outcomes in criminal justice in ways that can disadvantage black and minority ethnic people. One study found that university professors were far more likely to respond to emails from students with white-sounding names. Another showed that white people perceived black faces as more threatening than white faces with the same expression. While some of our biases may begin on an unconscious level, experts caution that the concept of unconscious bias should not absolve people of discriminatory behaviour. “If you’re aware of these associations then you can bring to bear all of your critical skills and intelligence to see it’s wrong to think like that,” says Lasana Harris, a neuroscientist who studies prejudice and social learning at University College London. “We all have the ability to control that.”



Asked whether her research on chimpanzees had affected how she felt about people, Goodall said it had shown her humans had a lot of instincts, and inherited aggressive tendencies. “They’re not learned. They’re just there,” she said.

Harry said: “It’s the same as an unconscious bias – something which so many people don’t understand, why they feel the way that they do. Despite the fact that if you go up to someone and say: ‘What you’ve just said, or the way that you’ve behaved, is racist,’ they’ll turn around and say: ‘I’m not a racist.’

“I’m not saying that you’re a racist, I’m just saying that your unconscious bias is proving that, because of the way that you’ve been brought up, the environment you’ve been brought up in, suggests that you have this point of view – unconscious point of view – where naturally you will look at someone in a different way. And that is the point at which people start to have to understand.”