The focus on impact awareness may lead to a global skepticism about moral responsibility, in other words.
That said, lacking impact awareness of the effects of implicit bias on our behavior may not exculpate agents from responsibility even in principle.
These findings suggest that mindfulness interventions are associated with changes in functioning of the insula, plausibly impacting awareness of internal reactions 'in-the-moment'.
One problem with focusing on impact awareness, however, as Holroyd (2012) points out, is that we may be unaware of the impact of a great many cognitive states on our behavior.
This suggests that impact awareness may not serve as a good criterion for distinguishing responsibility for implicit attitudes from responsibility from other cognitive states, notwithstanding whether global skepticism about moral responsibility is defensible.
However, if the question is whether agents are blameworthy for behaviors affected by implicit biases (rather than for having biases themselves), then perhaps impact awareness is what matters most (Holroyd 2012).
This allows researchers to determine the cervical muscle response under many different scenarios, including varying direction of impact, awareness of impending impact, and others, without subjecting volunteers to any discernible risk.
An initial series of results of impacts from eight directions is presented here, and these reveal that the cervical response to whiplash-type impacts is modified by impact awareness, muscles studied, and direction of impact.
Gawronski and colleagues (2006) argue that agents typically lack "source" and "impact" awareness of their implicit attitudes, but typically have "content" awareness.[21] Evidence for content awareness stems from "bogus pipeline" experiments (e.g., Nier 2005) in which participants are led to believe that inaccurate self-reports will be detected by the experimenter.
