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A population of more than 50 binary black hole mergers has now been observedby the LIGO and Virgo gravitational-wave observatories. While neutron stars areknown to have large velocities associated with impulsive kicks imparted to themat birth in supernovae, whether black holes receive similar kicks, and of whatmagnitude, remains an open question. Recently, Callister et al. (2021) analysedthe binary black hole population under the hypothesis that they were all formedthrough isolated binary evolution and claimed that large black hole kicks(greater than 260 km/s at 99% confidence) were required for the spindistribution of merging binary black holes to match observations. Here wehighlight that a key assumption made by Callister et al. (2021) -- that allsecondary black holes can be tidally spun up -- is not motivated by physicalmodels, and may lead to a bias in their estimate of the magnitudes of blackhole kicks. We make only minor changes to the Callister et al. (2021) model,accounting for a population of wider merging binaries where tidalsynchronisation is ineffective. We show that this naturally produces a bimodalspin distribution for secondary black holes, and that the spin-orbitmisalignments observed in the binary black hole population can be explained bymore typical black hole kicks of order 100 km/s, consistent with kicks inferredfrom Galactic X-ray binaries containing black holes. We conclude that themajority of the binary black hole population is consistent with forming throughisolated binary evolution.

Biases in estimates of black hole kicks from the spin distribution of binary black holes