Everyday Bias. Howard J. Ross
year!
Gulp!
We all have this mechanism built into the way we see the world. Through the course of this book, I’ll be discussing why that is, what purpose it serves, and how the brain operates in that way. But before we get to that, let me give you a quick example. This is a story you may have heard.
A man and his son get on an airplane. The plane takes off and shortly thereafter is hit by a tremendous storm, which causes a crash landing. The father is killed instantly, but miraculously, the son is injured but survives. An ambulance rushes him from the scene to the local hospital, where he is immediately taken to the operating room. After the boy is prepped for surgery, the surgeon approaches the operating table but then stops suddenly and says, “I can’t operate on this boy—he is my son!”
Who is the surgeon?
This joke, or similar ones have been around for years and most people probably know the answer: The surgeon is the boy’s mother!
Or is that accurate? Maybe, or perhaps it is the boy’s other father, because he is the child of a gay male couple?
Our minds quickly go to the solutions that make the most sense, and often miss other possibilities that are right in front of us. In later chapters I discuss in more detail as to how and why this happens.
My intention in writing this book is not to wag the finger of self-
righteousness at you, the reader, or to act like this is something that I am immune to any more than anyone else. In fact, I am very clear that we are all, as human beings, in this boat together!
One of the challenges that we have had in dealing with patterns of unconscious bias is that we have evolved into a “good person/bad person” paradigm of looking at issues relating to differences. I discussed this at length in my first book, ReInventing Diversity: Transforming Organizational Community to Strengthen People, Purpose and Performance.[9] The whole way we have approached the work is built upon the assumption that good people treat people equitably, and it is bad people who do all of those terrible things that we read and about in any manner of media. Often, this is especially true for people who come from a tradition of their own pain regarding “otherness.” For example, my family is of Eastern European Jewish origin. We lost dozens of family members in the Holocaust. I grew up hearing lots of talk and concern about anti-Semitism from various relatives. But I also heard questionable comments from these same relatives about people of different races. I have heard African Americans complain about racism but who then made homophobic or heterosexist comments. I have heard gays and lesbians make questionable comments about immigrants.
Do you know anybody who doesn’t have something going on with some “other” group?
In fact, what the research shows pretty definitively (and I’ll talk about some of this research in later chapters), is that most examples of bias, especially those that deferentially affect people in organizational life, are not conscious in origin at all. They are not decisions made because somebody is “out to get” somebody, but rather because all human beings have bias. Possessing bias is part and parcel of being human. And the more we think we are immune to it, the greater the likelihood that our own biases will be invisible or unconscious to us!
The challenge, of course, is that this is difficult for most of us to confront. Most people I know like to think of themselves as “good people.” We like to think that we treat everybody around us fairly, at least most of the time, and we shudder to think that we might be biased in our nature. And yet it is apparent that to be biased is almost as normal as breathing, and that our hidden fears and insecurities often get expressed in the various ways we react and respond to each other. So, as we have evolved into a greater sense of shared understanding that it is not “right” to have bias, have we gotten to the point where we can have racism without racists, sexism without sexists, and so on? And if so, how does this require us to reinvent how we deal with these issues if we are going to create organizations and societies in which all people have an equitable chance of success?
There are some people who are concerned about the movement toward a greater understanding of unconscious bias. Some fear that the focus on bias from an unconscious standpoint may provide cover for people who can easily deny their prejudice by claiming it is unconscious. R. Richard Banks and Richard Thompson Ford of Stanford Law School at Stanford University state
The better explanation for the ascendance of the unconscious bias discourse is that assertions of widespread unconscious bias are more politically palatable than parallel claims about covert bias. . . . The invocation of unconscious bias levels neither accusation nor blame, so much as it identifies a quasi-medical ailment that distorts thinking and behavior. People may be willing to acknowledge the possibility of unconscious bias within them, even as they would vigorously deny harboring conscious bias. The unconscious bias claim thus facilitates a consensus that the race problem persists. Despite its ostensible political benefits, the unconscious bias discourse is as likely to subvert as to further the cause of racial justice.[10]
These are valid and reasonable concerns. The fact that somebody exhibits bias unconsciously does not change the impact of the behavior. Assume for the sake of argument that the referees mentioned earlier were motivated by unconscious bias as opposed to a conscious desire to help some of the players and hurt some of the others. Does it ultimately matter to the players if they foul out of a big game because of that desire? Obviously not. However, we do know that the way we perceive people’s actions affects how we feel and how we choose to interact. In a recent study, Princeton University professors Daniel L. Ames and Susan T. Fiske found that “people saw intended harms as worse than unintended harms, even though the two harms were identical” (emphasis added). Ames and Fiske went on to suggest that as a result of this phenomenon, “people may therefore focus on intentional harms to the neglect of unintentional (but equally damaging) harms.”[11]
At the same time, we know that one of the great barriers to getting people to look at our own biases is the shame and guilt that comes when we feel like we are being made to look as if we have done something wrong, or that we are under attack. This shame and guilt causes defensiveness and reduces the chances of reaching people.
These biases make an impact upon each and every aspect of our lives. They affect the way we respond to threats. They make an impact upon the way doctors and patients interact. They affect the judgments we make about others. In organizational life, they influence how we interview people, who we hire, who we give job assignments to, who we promote, and who we’re willing to take a chance on. In fact, they make their mark upon virtually every aspect of organizational life. They also affect the way teachers educate students and how parents treat their own children. Virtually every important decision we make in life is influenced by these biases, and the more they remain in the unconscious, the less likely we are to make the best decisions we are able to make.
My purpose in writing this book is to find a way to invite people into a conversation about our own bias. To recognize that who we are and who we want to be as a society will ultimately be defined by our ability to raise our consciousness level beyond our tendency to simply react to fear. I am not calling for people to ignore unconscious bias. On the contrary, I am hoping that by understanding it we can learn to work with it and reduce its ability to dominate our decision making. I know there are psychologists who say this is almost impossible. And yet, my experience in working with hundreds of thousands of people has been such that I know we can make inroads in our abilities to be more conscious.
There are some who may say, “Just tell me what to do!” Ah, if only life were that simple. If so, then all we would have to do to lose weight would be to learn about diets, but many of us know how well that has worked (or not). Albert Einstein reportedly once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I knew the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.” Transforming our fundamental ways of living and being in the world requires learning new information and behaviors. It also requires a shift in our mind-sets and emotions about the subject at hand. That’s what I am attempting to create in this book. We will start by looking at what bias is and why