We never see Trump or Brexit coming because we drown in data and biases – Implicit Bias

2016/07/05 Leave a comment

Good piece by Mike Ross, Davide Pisanu and Blanche Ajarrista on the risks of bias and automatic thinking and the need to be more mindful:

Three ways to diminish the risk of overreliance on analytics or biased forecasting are the use of premortems, devil’s advocates and self-reflection. Tools that we all (including the market research organizations and newsrooms of the world) can implement more systematically to avoid shocks such as the Brexit result.

  • Premortems start with imagining that you are wrong, dead wrong, and that the worst has occurred. You then ask, what could be the cause of this predictive failure? Through this type of questioning, we can identify the limitations of the available data and dig deeper to improve the quality of the quality of the information used.
  • A devil’s advocate is appointed to ensure that contrarian positions have a voice at the table when groups are making decisions, but they are also useful on an individual basis. This person’s role is to argue against the group’s intention – essentially stating why everyone else is wrong. By clearly nominating someone to take this on (or by forcing yourself to question your own assumptions in this way), we free the advocate from the constraint of not wanting to go against the position of the group and in doing so allow them to highlight our collective blind spots.
  • Self reflection (by an individual or a group) is more of a habitual practice – ensuring that you think deeply on how your background, beliefs and socioeconomic context heavily bias your views. From the people you regularly interact with to the Facebook algorithm that pushes content to your stream, your view of the world is curated by your context. Forcing yourself to acknowledge this and actively seek out opinions counter to your own will diminish the influence your personal situation has on your decision-making, broaden your context and expand the range of data you’ll use to inform your decisions.

It’s not that data and analytics are inherently bad or that our biases are not useful in decision-making, but rather that these can be flawed.

By recognizing and using a set of tools to overcome these flaws, we can be much more effective decision-makers and avoid (and perhaps profit from) the shocking and the unexpected.

Source: We never see Trump or Brexit coming because we drown in data and biases – The Globe and Mail

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We Just Can’t Handle Diversity: HBR

2016/06/30 Leave a comment

We_Just_Can’t_Handle_DiversityGood long read by Lisa Burrell at HBR and the difficulties in ensuring diversity given our implicit biases and automatic thinking:

Senior leaders need to recognize their organizations’ inequities—probably more than anyone else, since they have the power to make changes. But once they’ve climbed to their positions, they usually lose sight of what they had to overcome to get there. As a result, Rosette and Tost find, “they lack the motivation and perspective to actively consider the advantages that dominant-group members experience.” This is especially true of successful white women, who “reported [even] lower perceptions of White privilege than did highly successful White men.” It’s fascinating that their encounters with sexism don’t help them identify racial advantage after they’ve gotten ahead. Perhaps, the authors suggest, their hard-earned status feels so tenuous that they reflexively tighten their grip.

Beyond murkily defined concepts and somewhat defensive motivations, we have an even-higher-level conceptual obstacle to overcome: our bias against diversity itself. Recent research by Ohio State University’s Robert Lount Jr. and colleagues (Oliver Sheldon, of Rutgers; Floor Rink, of Groningen; and Katherine Phillips, of Columbia) shows that we assume diversity will spark interpersonal conflict. Participants in a series of experiments all read, watched, or listened to the exact same conversations among various groups. They consistently perceived the all-black or all-white groups as more harmonious than those with a combination of blacks and whites.

If we expect people to behave less constructively when they’re in diverse organizations or teams, how do we interpret and reward their actual performance? Under the influence of those flawed expectations? Quite possibly.

So, Is It Hopeless?

According to the renowned behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman, trying to outsmart bias at the individual level is a bit of a fool’s errand, even with training. We are fundamentally overconfident, he says, so we make quick interpretations and automatic judgments. But organizations think and move much more slowly. They actually stand a chance of improving decision making.

Research by John Beshears and Francesca Gino, of Harvard Business School, supports that line of thought. As they have written in HBR, “It’s extraordinarily difficult to rewire the human brain,” but we can “alter the environment in which decisions are made.” This approach—known as choice architecture—involves mitigating biases, not reversing them, and Beshears and Gino have found that it can lead to better outcomes in a wide range of situations. The idea is to deliberately structure how you present information and options: You don’t take away individuals’ right to decide or tell them what they should do. You just make it easier for them to reach more-rational decisions. (For more on this idea, also see “Designing a Bias-Free Organization,” an interview with Harvard behavioral economist Iris Bohnet.)

There’s still an element of manipulation here: The organization sets the stage for certain kinds of choices. But that brings us back to what most of us can agree on, at least in the abstract: Diversity improves performance, and people who apply themselves and do good work should be treated fairly.

If the members of an organization could get behind those broad ideas, would it bother them that they were being nudged to do what they wanted to do anyway? It might—and that would be another cognitive roadblock to clear.

Source: We Just Can’t Handle Diversity

Interesting that the recent public service discussions on diversity, judging by reports I have seen, show no evidence of this deeper thinking of the challenges involved (even if, judging by the numbers, the public service is reasonably diverse – see Diversity and Inclusion Agenda: Impact on the Public Service, Setting the baseline).

When making a presentation on multiculturalism and the government’s inclusion and diversity agenda this week at Canadian Heritage, my assigned ‘homework’ for attendees was to take the Harvard-developed Implicit Association Test to be more mindful of their internal biases and prejudices. It certainly was revealing to me, as it has been to those I know who have taken it:

Public Servants Get Real About Diversity in the Public Service

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How Talking To People Can Reduce Prejudice

2016/04/12 Leave a comment

Interesting example of how face-to-face conversations that help people understand the other’s experiences, and identify some commonalities, can make a difference:

After the dust settled [from a previously falsified study], Broockman and Kalla went on with their experiment on transgender prejudices. LaCour’s misconduct only made them more determined to do the study for real. “There were all these volunteers who gave their Saturdays [to do the experiment],” Broockman says. “We had a certain sense of responsibility.”

They sent out surveys to thousands of homes in Miami, asking people to answer questions that included how they felt about transgender people and if they would support legal protection against discrimination for transgender people. Then volunteers from SAVE, an LGBT advocacy organization based in Florida, visited half of the 501 people who responded and canvassed them about an unrelated topic, recycling. Volunteers went to the other half and started the conversations that Fleischer thinks can help change minds.

After the canvass, the study participants answered the same questions about transgender people that they had answered before the study, including how positively or negatively they felt towards transgender people on a scale of 0 to 100. Those who had discussed prejudice they’d experienced felt about 10 points more positively toward transgender people, on average.

Broockman says that public opinion about gay people has improved by 8.5 points between 1998 and 2012. “So it’s about 15 years of progress that we’ve experienced in 10 minutes at the door,” he says.

Three months after the canvass, Broockman asked participants to fill out the survey again. They still felt more positively about transgender people than those who had gotten the unrelated canvass. “[That’s] the moment I backed away from my monitor and said, ‘Wow, something’s really unique here,’ ” he says. If the effect persists, Broockman says, the technique could be used to reduce prejudice across society.

That doesn’t mean everybody came away feeling more positive about transgender rights. Kalla says some people came away from the canvasser feeling very differently and some people not so much at all. And an uptick in 10 points on a feeling scale of 0 to 100 doesn’t sound like an epiphany. There wasn’t, however, any indication that those who started out with very negative feelings about transgender people were particularly resistant to the conversation. Broockman and Kalla published the results in Science on Thursday.

It is a landmark study, according to Elizabeth Paluck, a psychologist at Princeton University who was not involved with the work. “They were very transparent about all the statistics,” she says. “It was a really ingenious test of the change. If the change was at all fragile, we should have seen people change their minds back [after three months].” There are very few tests of prejudice reduction methods, and Paluck says this suggests the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s approach is actually far more effective than previous efforts, like TV ads.

There might be a couple of reasons for that. Broockman, now an assistant professor of political economy at Stanford University, says asking someone questions face-to-face like, “What are the reasons you wouldn’t support protections for transgender people, or what does this make you think about?” gets them to begin thinking hard about the issue. “Burning the mental calories to do effortful thinking about it, that leaves a lasting imprint on your attitudes,” he says.

Empathy may also be a factor. “Canvassers asked people to talk about a time they were treated differently. Most people have been judged because of gender, race or some other issue. For many voters, they reflect on it and they realize that’s a terrible feeling they don’t want anyone to have,” Broockman says.

The study’s conclusions differ from the conclusions of the LaCour’s falsified study from 2014 in one crucial way, Broockman says. LaCour claimed that there was only an effect from the deep canvass if it came from someone who was LGBT. “We found non-trans allies had a lasting effect as well,” Broockman says. That means canvassing is much more about conversational skill rather than identity.

It will take more studies and replications of this study before scientists know exactly what is influencing people’s opinions. But for now, the findings are a relief to David Fleischer. “To go into it with high hopes and then get this really bad piece of news, then to go forward anyway and have the accurate results? What a roller coaster of emotions,” he says.

The technique might be used to target any societal prejudice — or be used to increase prejudice, Broockman acknowledges. But even if that happens, he says, it at least will encourage people to think deeply about the issues they’re going to vote on.

Source: How Talking To People Can Reduce Prejudice : Shots – Health News : NPR

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Jobseekers resort to ‘resumé whitening’ to get a foot in the door, study shows

2016/03/18 Leave a comment

Further to earlier studies by Oreopoulos (How an ethnic-sounding name may affect the job hunt), additional confirmation of bias in resumé callbacks and the strategies being used by some visible minority applicants to improve their chances:

It’s a disturbing practice called “resumé whitening” and involves deleting telltale signs of race or ethnicity from a CV in the hopes of landing a job.

And it happens more often than you’d think.

According to a two-year study led by University of Toronto researchers, as many as 40 per cent of minority jobseekers “whiten” their resumés by adopting Anglicized names and downplaying experience with racial groups to bypass biased screeners and just get their foot in the door.

It’s when “Lamar J. Smith” becomes “L. James Smith” or “Lei Zhang” morphs to “Luke Zhang” — and the callback rates soar.

“It’s really a wake-up call for organizations to do something to address this problem. Discrimination is still a reality,” said Sonia Kang, lead author of “Whitened Resumés, Race and Self-Presentation in the Labour Market,” to be released in the Administrative Science Quarterly Journal Thursday.

“It shows us that racial minorities aren’t just passively receiving this discrimination. They are trying to do something about it.”

In the study, only 10 per cent of black job applicants — created by researchers based on real candidate profiles — received callbacks for job interviews if they stuck to their African names and experience with black organizations. However, the callback rate went up to 25.5 per cent if their names were “whitened” and their black experience was removed from their resumés.

In the case of the Asian applicants, only 11.5 per cent received callbacks if they used their Asian-sounding names and experience, compared to 21 per cent using whitened resumés.

When seeking jobs with employers known to have a pro-diversity image, minority job applicants were less likely to “whiten” their resumes, the study found.

But, perhaps most surprising, even with pro-diversity employers, the odds of getting called in for an interview were greater when a minority applicant took steps to hide their race, the research shows.

….In the third part of the research, 1,600 fictitious resumés — with no whitening, a whitened first name, whitened experience or a whitened first name and whitened experience — were sent in response to job ads.

In total, 267 or 16.7 per cent of the applications led to a job interview request. For black applicants, the callback gap between unwhitened resumés and those for which both the name and the experiences were whitened was 15.5 percentage points; for Asians, the gap was 9.5 percentage points.

Kang, an assistant professor of organizational behaviour and human resources management, said employers must go beyond the rhetoric of how they appreciate diversity in their workforce. “By creating a false sense of security, these (diversity) statements merely provide an illusion of diversity that might end up making things worse for minority applicants.”

How minority job applicants ‘whiten’ their resumés:

Unwhitened: Name of a black applicant on resumé appears as “Lamar J. Smith”;

Whitened: Changed to “L. James Smith”;

Unwhitened: Name of an Asian applicant on resumé appears as “Lei Zhang”;

Whitened: Changed it to “Luke Zhang”;

Unwhitened: Lists involvement as vice-president of Aspiring African American Business Leaders and peer counsellor of Black Students’ Association;

Whitened: Removes those organizations and replaces with causes such as “Give Kids a Smile Day” and first-year student orientation;

Unwhitened: Lists volunteer experience and interests that are exclusively within Korean community organizations;

Whitened: Removes them and replaces with hiking, snowboarding and activities common in Western culture;

Unwhitened: Being the political action chair of Black Students Association;

Whitened: Changes that to member of a generic minority business and entrepreneur group.

Source: Jobseekers resort to ‘resumé whitening’ to get a foot in the door, study shows | Toronto Star

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Could a ‘blind recruitment’ policy make Canada less racist?

2016/02/26 Leave a comment

Good debate and discussion to have, given work by Oreopoulos and others demonstrating hiring bias:

What’s in a name? More than you may think. Removing names from job applications — a process known as blind recruitment — can actually curb both overt racism and unconscious bias.

And at least one MP thinks that Canada should adopt the policy.

Liberal MP Ahmed Hussen made that statement after CBC Marketplaceinvestigated how race and culture influences how companies treat shoppers, apartment-hunters and job-seekers across Canada.

Hussen stood in Parliament Wednesday to suggest that the federal government follow Britain’s lead to better ensure our government ranks reflect the people they serve.

“We must ensure our public service adopts name-blind recruitment,” the newly elected MP said. “I rise today to bring attention to an idea that will assist in our fight to end discrimination and attain real equality in our country.

“It is crucial that Canadians who have got the grades, skills, and the determination succeed.”

Britain adopted a blind-recruitment policy for its civil service in October 2015 after a number of organizations found the practice worthwhile.

While visible minorities make up almost 20 per cent of Canada’s population, the civil service is less diverse at only 14 per cent, according to 2013 data.

The months-long Marketplace investigation looked at blind recruitment and how bias affects how we’re treated and how we treat one another, including why we intervene — or don’t — to defend a stranger.

‘It’s had a huge impact’

When the Toronto Symphony Orchestra began to audition musicians blindly in 1980, putting them behind a screen, the result was profound.

While the hiring committee could hear an applicant’s performance, they not see what he or she looked like. They even put down a carpet so high heels couldn’t be heard.

Now the orchestra — which was made up almost entirely of white men in the 1970s — is almost half female and much more diverse.

“It’s had a huge impact from the beginning, when screens came in,” says David Kent, the TSO’s principal timpanist and personnel manager.

Source: Could a ‘blind recruitment’ policy make Canada less racist? – Canada – CBC News

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The remarkably different answers men and women give when asked who’s the smartest in the class

2016/02/22 Leave a comment

Interesting:

Anthropologist Dan Grunspan was studying the habits of undergraduates when he noticed a persistent trend: Male students assumed their male classmates knew more about course material than female students — even if the young women earned better grades.

“The pattern just screamed at me,” he said.

So, Grunspan and his colleagues at the University of Washington and elsewhere decided to quantify the degree of this gender bias in the classroom.

After surveying roughly 1,700 students across three biology courses, they found young men consistently gave each other more credit than they awarded to their just-as-savvy female classmates.

Men over-ranked their peers by three-quarters of a GPA point, according to the study, published this month in the journal PLOS ONE. In other words, if Johnny and Susie both had A’s, they’d receive equal applause from female students — but Susie would register as a B student in the eyes of her male peers, and Johnny would look like a rock star.

“Something under the conscious is going on,” Grunspan said. “For 18 years, these [young men] have been socialized to have this bias.”

Being male, he added, “is some kind of boost.” At least in the eyes of other men.

The surveys asked each student to “nominate” their most knowledgeable classmates at three points during the school year. Who best knew the subject? Who were the high achievers?

University of Washington

To illustrate the resulting peer-perception gap, researchers compared the importance student grades had on winning a nomination to the weight of the gender bias. The typical student received 1.2 nominations, with men averaging 1.3 and women averaging 1.1.

Female students gave other female students a recognition “boost” equivalent to a GPA bump of 0.04 — too tiny to indicate any gender preference, Grunspan said. Male students, however, awarded fellow male students a recognition boost equivalent to a GPA increase of 0.76.

“On this scale,” the report asserted, “the male nominators’ gender bias is 19 times the size of the female nominators’.”

Source: The remarkably different answers men and women give when asked who’s the smartest in the class

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ICYMI: The False Promise of Meritocracy – The Atlantic

2015/12/23 Leave a comment

A note of caution of those who believe that hiring and other systems are based on objective meritocracy, without any influence of bias and prejudice, and a reminder of the need to be more mindful and aware of these biases:

Americans are, compared with populations of other countries, particularly enthusiastic about the idea of meritocracy, a system that rewards merit (ability + effort) with success. Americans are more likely to believe that people are rewarded for their intelligence and skills and are less likely to believe that family wealth plays a key role in getting ahead. And Americans’ support for meritocratic principles has remained stable over the last two decades despite growing economic inequality, recessions, and the fact that there is less mobility in the United States than in most other industrialized countries.

This strong commitment to meritocratic ideals can lead to suspicion of efforts that aim to support particular demographic groups. For example, initiativesdesigned to recruit or provide development opportunities to under-represented groups often come under attack as “reverse discrimination.” Some companies even justify not having diversity policies by highlighting their commitment to meritocracy. If a company evaluates people on their skills, abilities, and merit, without consideration of their gender, race, sexuality etc., and managers are objective in their assessments then there is no need for diversity policies, the thinking goes.

But is this true? Do commitments to meritocracy and objectivity lead to more fair workplaces?Emilio J. Castilla, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, has explored how meritocratic ideals and HR practices like pay-for-performance play out in organizations, and he’s come to some unexpected conclusions.In one company study, Castilla examined almost 9,000 employees who worked as support-staff at a large service-sector company. The company was committed to diversity and had implemented a merit-driven compensation system intended to reward high-level performance and to reward all employees equitably.

But Castilla’s analysis revealed some very non-meritocratic outcomes. Women, ethnic minorities, and non-U.S.-born employees received a smaller increase in compensation compared with white men, despite holding the same jobs, working in the same units, having the same supervisors, the same human capital, and importantly, receiving the same performance score. Despite stating that “performance is the primary bases for all salary increases,” the reality was that women, minorities, and those born outside the U.S. needed “to work harder and obtain higher performance scores in order to receive similar salary increases to white men.”

These findings led Castilla to wonder if organizational cultures and practices designed to promote meritocracy actually accomplished the opposite. Could it be that the pursuit of meritocracy somehow triggered bias? Along with his colleague, the Indiana University sociology professor Stephen Bernard, they designed a series of lab experiments to find out. Each experiment had the same outcome. When a company’s core values emphasized meritocratic values, those in managerial positions awarded a larger monetary reward to the male employee than to an equally performing female employee. Castilla and Bernard termed their counter intuitive result “the paradox of meritocracy.”

The paradox of meritocracy builds on other research showing that those who think they are the most objective can actually exhibit the most bias in their evaluations. When people think they are objective and unbiased then they don’t monitor and scrutinize their own behavior. They just assume that they are right and that their assessments are accurate. Yet, studies repeatedly show that stereotypes of all kinds (gender, ethnicity, age, disability etc.) are filters through which we evaluate others, often in ways that advantage dominant groups and disadvantage lower-status groups. For example, studies repeatedly find that the resumes of whites and men are evaluated more positively than are the identical resumes of minorities and women.

This dynamic is precisely why meritocracy can exacerbate inequality—because being committed to meritocratic principles makes people think that they actually are making correct evaluations and behaving fairly. Organizations that emphasize meritocratic ideals serve to reinforce an employee’s belief that they are impartial, which creates the exact conditions under which implicit and explicit biases are unleashed.

“The pursuit of meritocracy is more difficult than it appears,” Castilla said at a recent conference hosted by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford, “but that doesn’t mean the pursuit is futile. My research provides a cautionary lesson that practices implemented to increase fairness and equity need to be carefully thought through so that potential opportunities for bias are addressed.” While companies may want to hire and promote the best and brightest, it’s easier said than done.

Source: The False Promise of Meritocracy – The Atlantic

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Appreciate the History of Names to Root out Stigma – NYTimes.com

2015/10/20 Leave a comment

More on implicit bias and names, this time with respect to African-American names:

Besides the barrier to entry to employment that comes with a “black name,” employers also tend to hire “racially palatable” blacks or other minority individuals. If a person is unstereotypically non white — which is to say, for example, that he or she acts white — that person is more likely to be considered for the job.

Nontraditional names are testaments to nonconformity, but they do not signal combativeness or unacceptable personality fits.

The insidious bias against people with black-sounding names pops up long before they hit the job market. And usually, the more unusual the name, the more susceptible to bias. A study published in 2005 found that teachers had lower expectations for children with unusually spelled names like Da’Quan, even when compared to their siblings with “less black-sounding” names like Damarcus.

That’s because preconceived notions about black-sounding names are not only racist but an indication of class bias. Unusually spelled names that have punctuation are associated with low socio-economic status — a factor that consciously or unconsciously biases teachers, employers and everyone in between. The assumption of low socio-economic status is specific to African-American names (or so-called ghetto black names), as opposed to names of African origin like Nia or Jelani.

But the nuance of individualized, African-American names goes deeper. The diversification of baby names in America started in the late 1960s during a larger sociocultural shift that emphasized individuality, and that’s where names for black and white Americans began to diverge. As black Americans began to give unique names to their children (much more so than white Americans), there was a sharp rise in the prevalence of distinctively black-sounding names — influenced at least in part by the championing of black culture by the Black Power movement.

African-American names became symbols of resistance. They resist uniformity and West European influence, and therefore the limiting cultural framework of how one should present his or herself. When minority individuals are prejudged on the basis of their names, it is because those names do not conform. And in order for diverse identities to be reclaimed as such, we must appreciate the ideology behind unique names and root out the stigmas about them.

And while nontraditional names are testaments to nonconformity, they do not signal combativeness or unacceptable personality fits. They signal the multitudes of different experiences that shape people of color, and increased knowledge of these experiences can be wielded to combat bias.

Source: Appreciate the History of Names to Root out Stigma – NYTimes.com

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Is ‘they all look alike to me’ pure racism or is there a scientific reason for mistaken identity?

2015/09/26 Leave a comment

Another aspect of how our brains work and the implications in terms of how we see others:

Scientists, pointing to decades of research, believe something else was at work. They call it the “other-race effect,” a cognitive phenomenon that makes it harder for people of one race to readily recognize or identify individuals of another.

It is not bias or bigotry, the researchers say, that makes it difficult for people to distinguish between people of another race. It is the lack of early and meaningful exposure to other groups that often makes it easier for us to quickly identify and remember people of our own ethnicity or race while we often struggle to do the same for others.

That racially loaded phrase “they all look alike to me,” turns out to be largely scientifically accurate, according to Roy S. Malpass, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Texas at El Paso who has studied the subject since the 1960s. “It has a lot of validity,” he said.

Looking for examples? There is no shortage — in the workplace, at schools and universities, and, of course, on the public stage.

Lucy Liu, the actress, has been mistaken for Lisa Ling, the journalist. “It’s like saying Hillary Clinton looks like Janet Reno,” Liu told USA Today.

Samuel L. Jackson, the actor, took umbrage last year when an entertainment reporter confused him with the actor Laurence Fishburne during a live television interview.

“Really? Really?” Jackson said, chiding the interviewer. “There’s more than one black guy doing a commercial. I’m the ‘What’s in your wallet?’ black guy. He’s the car black guy. Morgan Freeman is the other credit card black guy.”

And as a Washington correspondent, I managed a strained smile every time white officials and others remarked on my striking resemblance to Condoleezza Rice, then the secretary of state in the Bush administration. (No, we do not look alike.)

Psychologists say that starting when they are infants and young children, people become attuned to the key facial features and characteristics of the those around them. Whites often become accustomed to focusing on differences in hair color and eye color. African-Americans grow more familiar with subtle shadings of skin color.

“It’s a product of our perceptual experience,” said Christian A. Meissner, a professor of psychology at Iowa State University, “the extent to which we spend time with, the extent to which we have close friends of another race or ethnicity.”

(Minorities tend to be better at cross-race identification than whites, Meissner said, in part because they have more extensive and meaningful exposure to whites than the other way around.)

Distinguishing between two people of a race different from your own is certainly not impossible, cognitive experts say, but it can be difficult, even for those who are keenly aware of their limitations.

Alice O’Toole, a face-recognition expert and professor of behavioral and brain sciences at the University of Texas at Dallas, admits that she often confuses two of her Chinese graduate students, despite her expertise.

“It’s embarrassing, really embarrassing,” O’Toole, director of the university’s Face Perception Research Lab, said. “I think almost everyone has experienced it.”

But as Blake’s case has demonstrated, the other-race effect can have serious consequences, particularly in policing and the criminal justice system. …

If you sometimes mix up people of different races, it might not be racism but an effect of psychological development, researchers say.

Malpass, who has trained police officers and border patrol agents, urges law enforcement agencies to make sure black or Hispanic officers are involved when creating lineups of black and Hispanic suspects. And he warns of the dangers of relying on cross-racial identifications from eyewitnesses, who can be fallible.

The good news is that we can improve our cross-racial perceptions, researchers say, particularly if there is a strong need to do so. A white woman relocating to Accra, Ghana, for instance, would heighten her ability to distinguish between black faces, just as a black man living in Shanghai would enhance his ability to recognize Asians. (Malpass believes that people who need to identify those of other races — in the workplace or elsewhere — are more likely to be successful than people who simply have meaningful experiences with members of other racial groups.)

Source: Is ‘they all look alike to me’ pure racism or is there a scientific reason for mistaken identity?

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Doctors Struggle With Unconscious Bias, Same As Police

2015/08/08 Leave a comment

Not surprising but some good examples of how these can play out:

Even as health overall has improved in the U.S., the disparities in treatment and outcomes between white patients, and black and Latino patients, are almost as big as they were 50 years ago. A growing body of research suggests that doctors’ unconscious behaviors play a role in these statistics, and the Institute of Medicine has called for more studies looking at discrimination and prejudice.

One study found that doctors were far less likely to refer black women for advanced cardiac care than white men with identical symptoms. Other studies show that African Americans and Latino patients are often prescribed less pain medication than white patients with the same complaints.

“We know that doctors spend more time with white patients than with patients of color,” says Howard Ross, founder of management consulting firm Cook Ross.

He’s developed a new diversity training curriculum for health care professionals that focuses on the role of unconscious bias in these scenarios.

Doctors and nurses don’t mean to treat people differently, Ross says. But, just like police, they harbor stereotypes that they’re not aware they have. Everybody does.

“This is normal human behavior,” Ross says. “We can no more stop having bias than we can stop breathing.

Unconscious biases often surface when we’re multitasking or when we’re stressed. They come up in tense situations where we don’t have time to think. Like police on the street at night who have to decide quickly if a person is reaching for a wallet, or a gun. It’s similar for doctors in the hospital.

“You’re dealing with people who are frightened, they’re reactive,” Ross says. “If you’re doing triage in the Emergency Room, for example, you don’t have time to sit back and contemplate, ‘why am I thinking about this,’ You have to instantaneously react.”

Doctors are trained to think fast, and to be confident in their decisions.

“There’s almost a trained arrogance,” Ross says.

This leads to treatments prescribed based on snap judgments, which can reveal internalized stereotypes. A doctor sees one black patient who doesn’t take his medication, perhaps because he can’t afford it. Without realizing it, the doctor starts to assume that all black  patients aren’t going to follow instructions.

Doctors Struggle With Unconscious Bias, Same As Police | State of Health | KQED News.

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