Tweet This
With recent reports on diversity from Google and Yahoo and reports in the WSJ that diversity programs can do more harm than good, the right way to approach Diversity and Inclusion is a hot topic. The thing is, almost nobody would admit to being prejudiced nowadays. In fact most of us honestly believe that we are not. But racial prejudice exists in the form of unconscious, inbuilt preferences towards those who are similar to us and away from those who are different. These innate biases influence our behavior and mean that we unwittingly exclude others: which, as I’ve explained previously, provokes a similar physiological response to physical pain, and damages engagement and productivity in an increasingly diverse workforce. So what can be done? Is it possible to reprogram our brains and remove these inbuilt, implicit biases?
A study published at the beginning of the year aimed to find out. As part of Project Implicit, researchers challenged scientists to create an intervention that would change people’s implicit biases. They pitted 17 of these interventions against each other in a huge study using the computerized Implicit Associations Test (IAT): a widely-recognized measure of implicit biases. On the IAT, participants must categorize words and faces as quickly and as accurately as possible by pressing one of two keys. For example, they must press the left key when they see a ‘good’ word or a white person, and the right key when they see a ‘bad’ word or a black person. Then these pairings are reversed – black people and good words on the left, white people and bad words on the right. Typically, white participants are slower to respond with the black-good and white-bad pairings, suggesting that they unconsciously associate black people with negative emotions; an implicit bias.
Photo credit: Thinkstock
Over 17,000 white participants took part in the study. Of the 17 interventions tested, eight were successful in reducing implicit bias scores at least once. The characteristics of the successful versus unsuccessful interventions hold some interesting insights for start-ups or established businesses wondering how best to cultivate that elusive ‘diverse and inclusive’ culture.
Contrary to the approach taken by ‘traditional’ diversity training, encouraging individuals to consider other people’s perspectives and appealing to their humane, egalitarian values made no difference. Contemplating the injustice of racial discrimination and considering that ‘we’re all in this together’ (using the example of the US basketball team and its black stars), didn’t affect bias scores. While these rational, philosophical approaches may impact self-reported prejudice – ‘yes, of course I agree that everyone deserves equal career opportunities’ – they don’t seem to alter our unconscious beliefs. Likewise, inducing a positive emotion – ‘elevation’ – by having participants witness acts of kindness and charity, made no difference to IAT scores.
The interventions that did have an effect were much more explicit about what they were trying to achieve. One simply involved teaching participants how to ‘fake’ the IAT test (by slowing down on the white-good / black-bad pairings) – effective, but not particularly useful. The most successful interventions educated participants about their implicit prejudices and reinforced the association that black = good and white = bad, for example by making people imagine a black good Samaritan rescuing them from a violent white assailant, or playing in a dodge ball game where their black teammates help them while white opponents play dirty. ‘Evaluative conditioning’ which aimed to reverse participants’ implicit preferences by repeatedly pairing black people with good words and white people with bad words was also successful, as was making participants explicitly pledge to think ‘good’ when they saw a black person.
Overall, the more ‘involved’ the individual felt in the intervention, the better its chance of success – an important lesson for those who design diversity and inclusion training. Asking people to read case studies and respond to third-person scenarios won’t shift attitudes as well as forcing people to put themselves in the situation. In the intervention which asked participants to imagine being assaulted by a white attacker, the more vivid the description of the attack, the greater the impact.
Interestingly, most of the successful interventions were explicit about what they were trying to achieve and why. It’s important to remove the taboos around workplace discrimination and to educate people that bias is natural – what matters is that it doesn’t influence behavior. But worryingly, the majority of the successful interventions both associated black people with positive attributes and white people with negative attributes, reversing the natural direction of the white participants’ bias. Clearly reducing workplace bias by encouraging negativity towards a different group is not a solution.
The results of this comparison also raise an interesting question about the means of change and the outcome it achieves. Interventions which appealed to participants’ moral, conscious beliefs didn’t work, while those which targeted specific task behaviors – e.g. responding faster when black was paired with good – did. Some may argue that these interventions addressed the symptoms and not the cause. But in the workplace, when the ‘symptoms’ of implicit bias include unconsciously excluding and ostracizing others, addressing these behaviors may be a more effective use of time and resources than trying (and failing) to change the underlying beliefs which cause them.
It’s a tricky, emotive subject, but as more organizations wake up to the damaging consequences of implicit bias in terms of workforce engagement and performance, we can only hope for more research to shed light on how best to overcome it.
Follow @DrSebBailey on twitter or on Forbes at the top of this post.
