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Can we get the name of the study regarding the cost of bias to corporations?
Yes, the study is authored by the Level Playing Field Institute. It is titled "The Cost of Employee Turnover Due Solely to Unfairness in the Workplace" and is available at http://www.lpfi.org/docs/corporate-leavers-survey.pdf . Also, you might like to take a look at the Implicit Association Test that I mentioned. It is designed to uncover unconscious bias. Here is the link: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/ .
Is there a difference between a person who is biased and a person who is racist?
No, racism is simply a type of bias. Racism is present when the person believes that all members of another race share a certain characteristic or state of inferiority or superiority. It is the inflexible application of that belief that makes it a bias.
You say that experiences are unreliable sources of bias. How can that be true since an experience actually happens?
Of all the ways we learn bias, you would think that experience would be the most reliable. After all, we were there, we lived it, and we know what happened. Well, maybe and maybe not.
For one thing, any experience with one individual, or even 10 individuals, says nothing about other members of that group. The only thing that all members of any group have in common for sure is membership in that group - beyond that, they are individuals with individual characteristics which they may or may not share with others.
In addition, unless an experience is well rounded and repeated, it tells us little even about the person actually encountered. That is because a given experience may not mean what we think it does. One reason for this distortion is that most experiences that give rise to bias are brief and one-dimensional. Each is like a snapshot taken from one angle only, and that angle is, by physical necessity, from the perspective of the person holding the camera. The other side of the subject and the subtleties of shading and dimension that would accurately reflect the person's appearance are never recorded.
Another reason brief encounters are unreliable is that they are distorted by the emotion we bring to them - emotions that mean we can't trust what our senses tell us. Fear, guilt, anxiety, and myriad other feelings can leave us thinking, for example, that the other person was angrier, more threatening, or, at the other extreme, more passive than in fact was the case.
What you are really talking about are stereotypes. Don't stereotypes exist because a behavior has been observed often enough in a group to associate that group and the behavior?
You're right, for purposes of my work, I use "bias" to encompass what most people think of as "stereotypes," "prejudices," and that long list of "isms" that plague our workplaces on a daily basis.
You are also correct that stereotypes exist because the characteristic or behavior has been observed within a group. These beliefs came, after all, from somewhere and certainly some members of the group to which a characteristic is applied do conform to the content of the stereotype. There are, for example, Asians who are indeed good at math, women who are nurturing, and gay men who are artistic. However, just because some members of a group have a given characteristic does not mean they all do. In fact, one of the pitfalls we encounter in our journey to defeat bias comes in the form of encountering someone who happens to conform to our inflexible belief. The trick, when this happens, is to remind ourselves that the individual is just that - an individual - not a person who represents the characteristics of the entire group.
You mentioned that family, friends, media and experience are unreliable sources of the information that creates a bias. What is a reliable source?
There is no reliable source of a bias. Biases are, by their very nature, always unreliable and inaccurate. A bias is "an inflexible belief about a particular category of people." It is a belief that applies a characteristic to every member of a group. Although that characteristic might happen to apply to some members, it never can be applied to all.
Of course, it is possible to learn general information about groups, about cultures, about age groups. By "general" I mean that this information is held in our heads to consider as possibly true of someone. "Possibly" true is fine. It is when we seek to apply any characteristic to an entire group without looking at individual differences that we are headed into bias territory.
Are biases that grow out of a desire for personal safety - like when we are threatened by a member of a specific group - harder to overcome?
They sure are. This is because the desire to preserve our personal safety is the most fundamental of all human needs. Because of that, when threatened, we immediately form a belief system (a bias) that (for example) "All Puerto Ricans are thieves" just because one Puerto Rican happened to steal from us.
Picture, for example, a five-week-old puppy tentatively venturing out from her mother. Startled by the hiss of a cat and fearing for her safety, the dog whirls around and scurries back to the warmth of its pile of littermates. That puppy is in danger of forever assuming, because of the intensity of that emotion, that "all cats are dangerous" and, to make matters worse, of having an exaggerated idea of how different cats are from dogs. The puppy, in essence, becomes biased.
My boss seems to think that dealing with bias in our workplace is unrelated to our business goals. Is she right?
Yes, your boss is right IF she doesn't need her teams to function effectively together, IF she doesn't need people to feel comfortable voicing their ideas, and IF the company has a budget and a reputation that can bear the cost of bias-related discrimination suits.
Obviously that is a sarcastic answer. In fact, your boss is very wrong. It is impossible to list all the ways in which a bias-free workplace is a profitable workplace in this short space. I could go on about the expensive time managers spend diffusing bias-induced conflict, the cost of discrimination suits, and the price of losing valuable employees because of an inhospitable environment. I would rather, however, focus these few lines on a positive reason why reducing bias is beneficial to business: Innovation.
Dozens of studies - some of which are highlighted in the August/September 2006 issue of Scientific American Mind - have found that diversity, if properly managed, increases innovation. One of the key elements of "properly managed" is the creation of a workplace in which biases are minimal and people, therefore, feel comfortable voicing their ideas. In short, a bias-free workplace is one in which ideas and, therefore, profits have the opportunity to blossom. |
