In May, Dr Ema Sullivan-Bissett from the University of Birmingham joined us over Skype to investigate whether, and how, immersion in a virtual reality environment can affect implicit gender or racial biases.

Recent studies presume an associationist understanding of the nature of bias. However, recently philosophers have made a case for understanding implicit biases not (or not exclusively), in terms of associations, but rather as propositionally structured (Levy 2015, Mandelbaum 2016, Sullivan-Bissett 2019). However, no propositionalist has considered the work from virtual reality studies and how to integrate it into their theories. In this paper Dr Sullivan-Bissett examined the empirical work on virtual reality and implicit bias against this non-associationist background, in particular, looking at the belief and imagination models of implicit bias. She argued that the results therein are best accommodated by a model of bias that understands them as unconscious imaginings, and that as such, work on virtual reality supports the view that implicit biases are constituted by unconscious imaginings.