2015-08-25 09:05:31
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.