In a new paper, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign psychology professor Benedek Kurdi proposes a fresh approach to confronting implicit, or unintentional, bias in diverse organizations. He spoke with News Bureau life sciences editor Diana Yates about the problems associated with efforts to "train" the bias out of people and offers practical guidelines for those hoping to establish a more inclusive, welcoming atmosphere in their organizations. His report appears in the journal Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
What is implicit bias?
The simplest way to put it is that it's unintentional. Implicit bias is biased information that comes to mind about people when you interact with them. It may be the result of cultural influences or attitudes you've picked up from other people.
So, for example, you might have people with different social identities at a party. Some of them might be older; some of them might be younger. They might differ in body shape and size. They might differ in race or sexual orientation and, without you intending to, some stereotype comes into your mind about them. This can influence how you interact with them, with sometimes negative consequences.
What are some examples of implicit bias?
You may have the attitude that people with higher body weight are lazy or that older people are more gullible than their younger counterparts or are not good at using technology. You may assume, without thinking, that certain groups are immoral or more violent than your own.
Since people are not always conscious of their own biases, how do you measure them?
The most well-known measure is the Implicit Association Test, where words and pictures come up on a screen and your job is to sort them as quickly and accurately as possible. The speed with which people put a concept and a group together reveals their implicit attitudes, or stereotypes, toward that group. So, for example, both men and women find it easier to group women with the concept of "home" and men with "work." They find it harder to make the opposite pairings. This slows them down, revealing their underlying stereotypes.
Is implicit bias changeable at the societal level and at the personal level?
We do have very good evidence that implicit bias does change at the societal level. My colleague, Tessa Charlesworth, has a bunch of papers that have shown this in the United States. Tessa and I also have a recent report that shows this on an international level.
It happens across many different countries as well. If you look back at the past 15-20 years, sexuality bias has gone down massively. Race bias has also changed, not nearly as much as sexuality bias, but it has changed noticeably toward less bias. Skin tone bias is very interesting because that's the one that has changed toward less bias in the U.S. but more bias internationally.
We also have good statistical evidence that individual people are changing, probably in response to changing cultural environments.
However, no one has reliably demonstrated that interventions that reduce bias in the moment - in an experimental setting, for example - induce long-term changes beyond a few days or even hours.
How can any intervention induce that kind of change, especially when societal attitudes and norms reinforce particular biases?
The idea that a quick, five-minute study can cause biases that have been built up over decades to go away forever is very unrealistic. I think it would be very strange if you could undo 40 years of learning that quickly. So, the question is how can we supercharge these interventions in such a way that we can produce lasting impact?
In the new journal article, I propose a series of guidelines to drive what I call "implicit bias education." I don't call it training, because training as a term evokes the impression that you can train people's biases away in five minutes or an hour. That's not how the mind works.
People must be active participants in this process and buy into it. Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin and his colleagues have shown multiple times that when you mandate this, and especially when you talk down to people and portray implicit bias as though it were a personal moral failure on their part, the best-case scenario is that nothing changes. The worst-case scenario is that the stigmatized people become targets, and their well-being actually suffers as a result of it.
So, what are the ingredients of a successful approach?
First, you need to treat participants as autonomous agents who can think for themselves. We're not spoon-feeding information from a morally superior position. You have to have willingness; you have to have engagement. This is a bidirectional process.
Second, it's important to have a long-term, broad and integrated effort. The information explored in an implicit bias education program should be integrated into how the organization structures itself, how it operates. For example, an organization might choose to review job applications without revealing the applicants' names, to avoid any implicit biases that crop up from knowing a person's gender or ethnic origin. This relies on buy-in from stakeholders to demonstrate that the implicit bias educational program is not just checking off a legal requirement but is part of an ongoing, integrated process.
And of course, any intervention should be evidence-based. This means that the techniques used have been tried and validated in scientific studies.
Finally, the outcomes of any implicit bias education efforts should be measurable. There are a lot of for-profit implicit bias workshops where no outcomes ever get measured at all. If you're not measuring your outcomes, you will never know if you have achieved your goal.
Does society even care about overcoming implicit bias these days?
I think there's a segment of the population whose ideas are antithetical to the enterprise of implicit bias education. If the basis of your ideology is that group-based hierarchy is better than moving in a direction of more equality, then you may not want to participate in implicit bias education at all, which is completely fine.
At the same time, there is also a business case for diversity that says if you want to make as much money as possible as a company, you need to optimize your selection processes and your retention programs to hire the right people for the job. And it's not always going to be the person who stereotypically comes to mind first.
