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Francesca Gino
August 24, 2015
No matter how highly you think of your organization, chances are its members
including you are biased in ways that harm both you and others. Decades of
research tell us that systematic errors affect our judgments and decisions at
work, as well as the way we interact with others. And some of these biases are
unconscious, including racial, gender, and income discrimination. The
consequences of such insidious biases can be quite costly to an organization,
from leading it to hire or promote the wrong candidates to investing in less
innovative ideas just because of who proposed them to crossing ethical
boundaries.
For instance, Lamar Pierce (of the Olin Business School in St. Louis) and I
found evidence of illicit behavior as a result of income discrimination, when
we analyzed data on hundreds of thousands of records on inspectors conducting
vehicle emission tests. Inspectors felt envy toward customers driving luxury
cars and empathy with those driving standard cars since, like them, they did
not seem to have high salaries given the type of car they drove. As a result,
inspectors were more likely to fraudulently assist the customers driving
cheaper cars, passing them even if they didn t abide by emissions guidelines.
Increasingly aware of the costly consequences of bias, leaders at various
companies are taking action. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg recently wrote about
her company s introduction of a course for its employees aimed at combatting
unconscious biases. A new website shares Facebook s presentations on bias with
the public.
Such training programs are a positive step, but, in order for them to be
effective, they need to be thoughtfully developed something that Facebook seems
to have done. In fact, just raising awareness of unconscious biases is not
sufficient to end them in organizations (as I discussed in this post). To
effectively combat them, training programs also need to help people accept that
biases affect them, stress their concern about the consequences, and assure
people are willing to learn to replace those tendencies with ones that more
closely match their values (e.g., not having prejudice).
Raise awareness and acceptance of the influence of bias. Training programs are
generally a good tool for raising awareness about the existence of biases and
their implications, especially when they give participants the opportunity to
test the extent to which they are biased. (If you are curious about your
implicit biases in a wide variety of domains, from race and gender to religion
and age, you can take an online test here).
Having taught courses on biases and decision making to executives and MBA
students for quite some time, I know that it is not always easy for people to
accept that systematic errors affect their decisions. Most of my students
easily recognize that their colleagues and friends are biased but generally don
t think they are themselves. Stressing that even smart, well-intentioned
people are influenced by biases because of the way our minds are wired usually
helps my students feel more accepting of the fact that they may have
discriminated against others based on gender, race or other factors in the
past.
Stress concern about the consequences of bias. We all care about the outcomes
of our actions. And research suggests that when we realize that our behavior
affected others negatively, we get more concerned about actually fixing our
actions so that they do not generate the same costs to others in the future.
For instance, Lisa Shu (of London Business School), Max Bazerman (of Harvard
Business School), and I found that identifying the victims of our behaviors
makes people feel less virtuous about it as compared to leaving the victims
unknown.
Discuss strategies that eliminate unconscious bias and how to apply them.
Despite decades of research on the pervasiveness and workings of biases, only a
few studies to date have examined how to effectively reduce them. This research
has identified a few successful interventions that can be discussed in training
programs. In one experiment, Nilanjana Dasgupta (of the University of
Massachusetts Amherst) and Anthony Greenwald (of the University of Washington)
found that it is possible to at least temporarily reduce people s prejudices by
showing them pictures of iconic examples of individuals who do not fit common
stereotypes such as African-American icons like Martin Luther King, Jr., in
conjunction with infamous white villains like serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.
Another approach that proved effective in reducing unconscious racial bias was
tested in research studies where people listened to stories, told in the second
person (the you voice), in which a white assailant was attempting to hurt
them and a black man came to their rescue. A longer and more vivid version of
the story that increased its emotional pull was doubly effective at reducing
bias. Yet another approach that worked well involved telling participants to
imagine a scenario in which they were playing a game of dodge ball in which
everyone on their team was black and everyone on the opposing team was white.
These might sound like short-term mind games, but some evidence suggests the
effects of these interventions could be long lasting. In one experiment,
carried out over 12 weeks, non-African-American students in a psychology course
were first alerted to their prejudice (90% of them showed anti-black bias) and
taught a range of de-biasing strategies they could employ on their own time.
This was done through an education and training program that involved two
components which reflect the steps we are discussing.
First, it educated participants about implicit biases in order to evoke a
general concern about them and provided information about the implications of
implicit bias for discriminatory behaviors across a wide range of settings
(e.g., interpersonal, employment, health). Second, it presented five different
strategies to eliminate such biases and described how to apply them in daily
life.
For instance, one strategy was perspective taking: adopting the perspective of
a member of a stigmatized group. A second was contact: increasing exposure to
members different on dimensions such as race and gender. Yet another was
individuating: viewing others according to their personal characteristics
rather than stereotypical ones.
As part of the intervention, participants in the study were prompted to report
and reflect on their use of these strategies. The results: With the
participants sustained effort, prejudicial attitudes decreased and stayed down
for at least two months. Thus, unconscious biases, like a bad habit, can be
unlearned, but it takes some conscious effort.
Similar to the intervention used in this study, training programs should
involve discussions of a variety of strategies that can effectively reduce bias
and of ways in which people can apply them. For instance, employees may be
encouraged to get into the habit of pausing to ask themselves if they would
react differently to a person if she or he was of the opposite gender or
belonged to a different race.
By taking all these steps deliberately, anti-bias programs can succeed in
reducing or even eliminating biases in the workplace.
Francesca Gino is a professor at Harvard Business School, a faculty affiliate
of the Behavioral Insights Group, and the author of Sidetracked: Why Our
Decisions Get Derailed, and How We Can Stick to the Plan (Harvard Business
Review Press, 2013). She cochairs an HBS executive education program on
applying behavioral economics to organizational problems. Follow her on Twitter
@francescagino.