Day 107.

I saw some pictures of Mike Pence helping with cleanup at the Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in Missouri. He talked about the people of Missouri inspiring him with their response. He did not mention the inspiring fundraiser by Muslim Americans that reached its goal of $20,000 within three hours. Why did he leave that out?

During his debate with Tim Kaine last fall, Pence revealed a misunderstanding of the concept of implicit bias in a critical way: he conflated it with explicit, or conscious, bias.

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.”

The first thing to do once you understand what implicit bias is is to understand how it affects you – and it affects everyone. The Project Implicit website houses a series of tests online which you can take to see how implicit bias affects your perceptions.

Take some time to go to Project Implicit and take a few tests. I’m going to do the same. I will talk about my results here tomorrow.