Can You Overcome Inbuilt Bias?

Interesting psych experiment, showing that appealing to higher motives less effective than more targeted tasking to reduce implicit biases:

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.

Can You Overcome Inbuilt Bias?.