What is Lurking in Our Minds? Unconscious Biases and What to Do about Them

If you’ve been working for at least a few years, especially in the corporate world, you’ve probably done an unconscious bias training. These trainings can be frustrating and ineffective! They fail to really provide deep understanding about bias, and they do not usually provide practical solutions. In this episode, Michael Baran provides that deep understanding with some compelling research studies and with a fascinating account of how biases develop, starting in childhood. He also describes what can be done about these unconscious (or implicit) biases at work, both to reduce our own biases and to mitigate biases with policies and practices.

Have you ever done an unconscious bias training? They can be both incredibly frustrating and entirely ineffective. Why is understanding bias important, and what can we do about it?

In this episode of The Culture Advantage, host Michael Baran explains why he has found unconscious bias trainings frustrating. First, they fail to provide a deep understanding of what bias really is and why we have them. And second, they fail to give practical solutions that can be implemented at work. Michael provides that deep dive into what unconscious bias really is, why we develop biases starting in early childhood, and what we can really do about them. 

Michael narrates some of the classic and striking research studies about unconscious bias, focusing first on a study about gender bias in orchestras. When the gender of the candidate was fully blocked by putting a screen on stage, more women were immediately hired, because the interviewers were just listening to the music without the bias getting in the way.  In a second example, Michael describes how copies of the exact same resume were sent out to jobs, only with half of them using a stereotypically sounding white name, and half of them using a stereotypically sounding Black name. These studies highlight the striking impact that bias can have on our workplace decisions.
  
Understanding the impact of bias, what can we do about it? The suggestions that we just try to “make our unconscious biases more conscious” don’t feel helpful because (1) we don’t know what they are, and (2) they are deep seated. Instead, Michael provides some practical tools for how we can reduce our own biases in the long term while also thinking about ways to block the impacts of bias immediately at work. Suggestions include (1) using the Implicit Association Test as a learning tool, (2) diversifying our perspectives and getting to know more about others, (3) introspecting when we commit subtle acts of exclusion, (4) keeping a bias journal, (5) diversifying panels and committees and considering other perspectives when making decisions, (6) baking the bias mitigation into policy and practice, and (7) slowing down the big decisions.

This episode will intrigue everyone and will deepen your understanding of not only bias but also brain development. And then, it will provide practical ways to begin a process of bias reduction, in our own heads, and in our workplaces.

Transcript

What is Lurking in Our Minds? Unconscious Biases and What to Do about Them

Is your company struggling, navigating through high turnover, toxic leadership, or a culture that's holding your team back from reaching its full potential? Well, you're not alone. So here's your host and guide, Michael Baran.

Michael Baran: Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast. I'm really excited to dive in with you this week and talk about something which I find frustrating and really poorly understood. And if you have been working for a few years, especially if you've been working in the corporate space. I bet you've done some version of this.

I'm talking about unconscious bias training. Okay. Why do I find unconscious bias training frustrating? First, because I don't really think it explains very well what bias [00:01:00] is and why we have it. And then second, I don't really feel like the solutions offered. Are very useful and sometimes they wanna make me tear my hair out.

So let's dive into that. Okay. Bias. What is bias, right? It's just a preference for or against a thing or a person or a group, right? There are biases that we have that are conscious. We know them, right? We can talk about 'em. Like, I have a bias against certain genres of music. Right. I hear it and my brain automatically thinks I'm not gonna like it.

It makes it so I don't have to even listen to every individual song. It's like this shortcut, right? That helps me figure out what I might actually want to listen to. Is that great? It's not great. Right. But I have it. And I know that, and it just affects me, [00:02:00] right? And what I listen to.

So it's not really doing harm to anyone, but there are other biases that we have that we really don't know that we have. I mean, we really don't know. Okay. I am gonna illustrate that with a couple stories. First. I want you to think about orchestras, big famous city orchestras. You might have heard this example before, but I think it's worth repeating.

They were almost all men, right? In the mid 19 hundreds, almost all men being hired for these orchestras, and think about how you audition for an orchestra. Somebody walks up on stage, they play their music. There's a jury of people in the audience, they decide to, you know, make an offer or not, right? You ask that jury, Hey, are you just trying to hire men here?

And what do they say? Of course not. We're the New York Philharmonic. We're trying to be the [00:03:00] best orchestra in the entire world. We don't have time for that nonsense, and they're not lying. They really think they're just listening to the music. Now, some researchers have this idea to test that out, right?

They thought. I believe them, but I wonder if there's something else going on. Something maybe unconscious. So they put up a big screen on the front of the stage and they had people walk in behind the screen and play their music. And at first the researchers were shocked because it didn't make any difference.

Right. Can you think of why it didn't make any difference? Maybe you've heard this before. It didn't make any difference because they could still hear women's high heels walking in on the floor, so they didn't see the person, but they categorized them anyways, right? 'cause they heard the gender, so they had people take off their shoes, walk in on a carpet, play their music, and [00:04:00] boom, just like that.

You got more women hired for orchestras. 'cause then people really were just listening to the music without the bias getting in the way. Now, some really important things to talk about with that first. I hear a lot people saying, well, biases, they're basically true. They're just a shortcut to be able to do what you're doing faster.

Right. And I wanna be really clear here. The bias didn't help these people make better decisions. It made them make worse decisions. Okay. That's one second. This does not address the equity issue, right? In other words, it doesn't address the fact that not everyone has an equal chance to get music lessons and to get the privilege of, playing music and having music tutors and coaches and lessons, and getting to that point of being able to play and audition for a [00:05:00] big, famous city orchestra, right?

That costs around. $250,000 I've been told by a music teacher to get someone to the point where they could be good enough to audition for that. And certainly not everyone has that opportunity. Right? So we got more women hired, right? But we didn't address the long-term issue about who's getting that kind of access.

Right. And in fact there might even be bias there making it so people, channel resources into boys 'cause they think they're going to be better than girls at music, even though it's not true. Right. Okay. The other thing I wanna say about that is. Okay. Recognizing the results of this experiment, could we have done unconscious bias training with this jury of people sitting in the audience and try to reduce their biases?

Yeah, we could have, right? But these biases go deep, which [00:06:00] I'll talk about in a minute. So that's gonna take a while. Right. So that can't be our only solution. We have to also put up that barrier so the bias doesn't get in our way. Right now, we can do the bias reduction training. That's good, but let's block it so it gets out of our way now.

Okay, now next example I wanna give you is from more of a corporate setting. You might have heard of this one too, a famous resume study where they took the exact same resume printed out. Hundreds of copies of it, right? Same exact resume. And on half of 'em, they put a stereotypically white sounding name on half of 'em.

They put a stereotypically black sounding name. They sent them out for real jobs. Okay? Now you ask the people evaluating those resumes, Hey, are you trying to just hire white people? And what do they say? Of course not. [00:07:00] I'm trying to hire the best candidate. Right? And again, they're not lying, but what happened in this study?

The resumes, even though it was, the exact same word for word, except the name, the ones with the stereotypically white sounding name, got not 10, not 20, not 30, not 40, 50% more callbacks for interviews. Right, because of the bias that was triggered. They did another version of that study where they sent resumes out to different job levels, and they used an algorithm to calculate that.

Having a white sounding name was equivalent to eight years of job experience in the market. That's mind blowing. And of course, it's not just names that are triggering biases. It might be, what year did you graduate college? It might be what's the address on the resume? If you know an area really well, it might be [00:08:00] what activities have you been involved in?

It might if you're coming in for an interview, what do you look like? What is your. Accent if you have one. Do you have tattoos? All sorts of things might be triggering biases as well. Now that study was done a while ago, recently did an updated one, e economists from the University of Chicago and Berkeley, and they wanted to see is this still happening?

They even isolated it down to the individual organization and how much bias they have. I guess the bad news is that there's still lots of bias affecting a bunch of companies up to 24%, right? Not 50% more likely to get called back, but 24%, which is still high. I guess that's the bad news. The, the good news is overall the impact of bias has gone down, but even more importantly, in some organizations.

The bias reduction has been huge. Maybe [00:09:00] only 3% in some organizations, so it's not inevitable. There are things we can do to block the impact of that bias. Now. I think it's fascinating to think about why do we have biases? How do they develop, okay. Because a lot of times when people do unconscious bias trainings, they just say, oh, we all have bias because we're human.

That's just the way it is, and that's not very satisfying to me. I spent eight years getting a doctorate trying to figure this out from the perspective of cultural anthropology and cognitive psychology. Maybe that's a little bit overkill. You don't have to do that. But I will tell you because I think it's fascinating.

So I want you to imagine, right? Put yourself in the little tiny shoes of a baby or a toddler. I'm talking 0 1 2, 3 years old, right? Here you [00:10:00] have this little person and their brains are learning all about the world, right? I did some work with the Harvard Center on the developing child, and they, uh, many years ago, they told me this stat that the, that babies at that age, children at that age were forming 700 new synaptic connections, right?

Synaptic connections, brain connections, 700 new ones per second. And that blew me away. Right? 700 new ones per second. And I thought about it and I always would talk to people about it. A few years later, I was working with them again and I was just mentioning, oh gosh, I always talk about that statistic, about 700 new synaptic connections.

And they said, oh. Michael, we've got new instruments. Now we can measure to a finer grain detail. Now we know it's one to 2 million synaptic connections per second. Okay? So their brains are [00:11:00] literally exploding. Building the architecture of the way they understand the world, right? We come into the world and we don't have a lot of instincts.

We learn, our brains learn in this cultural environment, and they're really learning about the world, even though it doesn't necessarily look like that much is going on. I've got four kids. So I've seen kids at this age. I know sometimes it looks like they're just playing with some blocks or dropping a pen and again and again.

Or not paying attention. Right. But their brains are really paying attention. And so I want you to think of a simple example where maybe you've got a child of this age one, one and a half year old or something, 2-year-old, and, that person's parent is on the phone with someone else. They think the kid's not paying any attention and that parent says, oh yeah, he's gonna have a black preschool teacher next year.

I'm excited something. Right? And that child looks [00:12:00] bored and like they're not paying attention. That child just learned a ton about the world from that one little utterance, right? People think kids learn about race, for example, by looking out at people, and people look different, and so they just form categories because people look different.

But think about it with any physical difference you wanna talk about. It's a spectrum. It's not a group with a clear boundary, right? That's not how they learn about race. They learn it from language. So that kid just heard, oh, black teacher, right? Then form a little cognitive placeholder, like, oh, there's a category of people called black.

I wonder what's the deal with that category? Right? They don't think it consciously, but their brain does, and it's gotta try to figure out what's the deal with that category? Who fits into it? Why do I need to know it? Right? They also learned every other time a [00:13:00] mom said teacher, it didn't have a color in front of it.

So there's something different and marked about that category, which makes it really important to figure out. Also they learned, Hey, my parents excited about it, or worried about it, or feeling something about it. So I really have to figure out what the deal is with that. And so they start to form these categories and these associations, and then often they notice things and they have questions and they might ask a teacher or an adult or a parent, these questions about people.

And what happens now, I'm gonna primarily talk about white parents here because white parents don't really like talking to their kids about race. And I'll tell you how I know this. There was another study where they wanted to test, which is more impactful on how a kid understands the diversity in the world.

A parent talking to them about [00:14:00] it. Sesame Street and 10 minutes of Sesame Street talking about it, or both, or none of those, right? So those are the four conditions in this experiment. And they gave the parents like a politically correct, pre-approved script to read. So everyone was saying the same thing.

Now guess which one of those was more impactful? Think about it. I will tell you, we have no idea because all of the white parents dropped out of that study, right? They literally wouldn't. They went through the trouble of signing up for the study, imagining what am I gonna do with this $50 gift card, whatever it was that they got and then dropped out.

'cause they didn't wanna read that script, didn't wanna talk about race with their young children. Now why is that? Maybe it's 'cause they feel insecure about what they're gonna say. Maybe it's 'cause they really want their child to grow up and be colorblind. They don't want the kid to learn about race or [00:15:00] racism from them.

Right. So maybe it's well intentioned, but what's the impact of that? You have all these associations being made in the kid's brain. Consciously we're told, don't think about that. Hey, we're all the same. Right? But their brain picks up on all these things they notice about the world that show that we're not all the same.

So they pick up on messages from, you know, news and, movies and TV shows and billboards. When you squeeze your kid's hand tighter, walking by certain people or certain neighborhoods, or lock your car door going by certain people or certain neighborhoods, they're learning, all that stuff. Even if it looks like they're not paying attention, they're learning it unconsciously.

They're explicitly told that's not true. So it becomes this unconscious bias. Now, to be clear, not all parents have the luxury of not talking about this stuff with their kids. Right. We know that, but I'm specifically talking about white [00:16:00] parents here in this study. So you get these associations being made, and then there are all these other cognitive biases that reinforce those associations.

It might be things like confirmation bias, right? When we start to think a thing is true, we see all the evidence that confirms it and we don't see any of the evidence. That disconfirms it, right? So the associations get stronger and stronger over time so that eventually you get to the point where you're in a job evaluating someone's resume, and those biases are there even though you wouldn't want them there, even though you don't know they're there.

So now. Unconscious bias training often doesn't go into that level of detail. I just find it fascinating and I hope you do too. Also, the thing that sometimes makes me wanna pull my hair out with unconscious bias training is when it gets to solutions, they will say, okay, so one of the solutions is you've gotta take unconscious bias and [00:17:00] make it conscious.

And I just wanna pull my hair out at that point. 'cause it's like it's unconscious, like, I don't know. I have it. How am I gonna do that? So instead, let's talk about some solutions, right? Going back to the orchestra example, let's talk about some solutions for reducing bias and for blocking it with that screen, right?

So for reducing it. A couple things you can do, right? We've all got unconscious biases. Let me be clear about that. We've all got them. If you are thinking right now, not me, you just don't know you have them. It might not be that. We all have the same ones. Right, because we don't, sometimes they're related to race.

Sometimes they're related to age or ethnicity or gender or sexuality or body type or size or disability, right? We don't know because it's unconscious, but [00:18:00] some of those are there. Now one tool for learning a little bit more about your own biases. It's a free tool. You can Google it. Right now. It's called the Harvard.

Implicit Association Test IAT. You can Google it. Basically, it has you trying to categorize things as fast as you can using your keyboard. And the idea is we know that we're not supposed to be biased, but when the bias is, showing up, we're a little bit faster to hit those keys. And so it measures the speed that you do it, and then it'll tell you at the end, oh, you're, you know, you're strongly or slightly biased in this one area, and you can do it for different dimensions of difference.

Now I recommend you do it. As a learning tool. In fact, if you want something to do this week after the podcast, maybe try that. I also recommend taking it with a grain of salt. It is not a perfect assessment of your own unconscious biases. [00:19:00] It's a great tool to learn and to question and to explore and over the millions of people that have done it, it's really good evidence about that, these unconscious biases and how they exist and how they show up in different ways.

So I encourage you to take it, right? Check it out. Another thing you can do to reduce bias is just learn about people. Learn about cultures. Diversify the people that you read, watch, listen to. Check out festivals that you might not usually go to. Just push yourself to learn more about people in the world that can help .

So take a bias and actually turn it into understanding of people and their diversity and their differences and their similarities. Okay? Another thing you can do is to ex think about, remember last week we talked about subtle acts of exclusion, and one of the windows you can get to exploring bias happens when you say something that [00:20:00] made someone else feel bad and you didn't mean it.

Right. You commit a subtle act of exclusion and you're kind of horrified. That's a moment to think. I wonder if there's a bias that showed up that made it so I did that in that situation, right? You can explore that. Talk with people now in terms of putting up the screen to block the bias from your, work, say what you do on a daily basis at work there are some recommendations.

One. I tell people, okay, it's unconscious. You're not gonna know where it's showing up. So maybe get a little notebook, call it a bias journal. And a few times during the day, just pause. Maybe put on a timer so you remember to do this and think, what am I doing right now? And how might a bias get in my way?

If I had one, how might it be showing up? What might it be affecting? And if it did, how could I block it? How could I put up that screen? Just do that for a week or two, and you'll start to [00:21:00] maybe see where bias might show up. Then you can get together with coworkers and really strategize and brainstorm and think of ways to block the bias.

Okay. That's one way. Another way of blocking the bias is just to make sure you're getting a diversity of perspectives. No matter what you're doing. Like if you're hiring for a position, get a diversity of people to be on that committee. 'cause again, we all have biases, but we don't have the same ones, and so our biases can kind of cancel each other or check each other.

Right. That can be helpful. Also when you do think of ways to block a bias, try to bake it into your policies or your practices at work. Don't just rely on individuals to, you know, to show up and remember to do it and to. Do it even when they're really busy. They get into policies, procedures, another recommendation, especially when it's a big decision or a big action, [00:22:00] slow things down.

The faster we're trying to go, the more bias creeps into what we're doing because again, it can be a shortcut that our brains take. And sometimes that's useful and sometimes it really gets in our way. Right? Makes us make a worse decision. Okay, that's what I've got for you this week. I gave you an activity you can do if you want to try something new this week, either, whether that's the, IAT or a bias journal.

Be well take care of yourself. I will see you or I'll talk to you soon.

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