Everyday Bias. Howard J. Ross
us about how the brain processes bias. We will look at how unconscious bias affects some of the most fundamental aspects of our lives, and the various ways it manifests itself. I will then share with you some of the resources that can help you learn about your own bias, and some of the ways that we are learning, individually and collectively, to reprogram our responses so that we can make better choices for ourselves, and our organizations and communities. By the time you reach the end of this book, you will not only have a better understanding of what you think, but of how you think!
Let’s get started.
1.
Adrian C. North, David J. Hargreaves, and Jennifer McKendrick, “In-Store Music Affects Product Choice,” Nature 390 (1997): 132. Adrian C. North, David J. Hargreaves, and Jennifer McKendrick, “The Influence of In-Store Music on Wine Selections,” Journal of Applied Psychology 84 (1999): 271–76.
2.
Charles S. Areni and David Kim, “The Influence of Background Music on Shopping Behavior: Classical Versus Top 40 Music in a Wine Store,” Advances in Consumer Research 20 (1993): 336–40.
3.
Adrian C. North, Amber Shilcock, and David J. Hargreaves, “The Effect of Musical Style on Restaurant Customer Spending,” Environment and Behavior 35 (2003): 712–18.
4.
Alan Schwartz, “Study of NBA Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls,” New York Times, May 2, 2007.
5.
Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, John F. Dovido, Victoria L. Brescoll, et al., “Science Faculty’s Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 109, no. 41 (2012): 16474–79.
6.
Consumer.healthday.com, Friday, May 24, 2013, “Many Medical Students have Anti-fatBias, Study Finds.”
7.
Sara N. Bleich, Wendy L. Bennett, Kimberly A. Gudzune, et al., “Impact of Physician BMI on Obesity Care and Beliefs,” Obesity 20, no. 5 (2012): 999–1005.
8.
Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, “Physician’s Weight May Influence Obesity Diagnosis and Care,” news release, January 26, 2012, http://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2012/bleich-physician-weight.html.
9.
Howard J. Ross, ReInventing Diversity: Transforming Organizational Community to Strengthen People, Purpose, and Performance (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).
10.
Richard R. Banks and Richard Thompson Ford, “(How) Does Unconscious Bias Matter?: Law, Politics, and Racial Inequality,” Emory Law Journal 58, no. 5 (2005): 1053–1122.
11.
Daniel L. Ames and Susan T. Fiske, “Intentional Harms Are Worse, Even When They’re Not,” Psychological Science 24, no. 9 (2013): 1755.
Chapter 1
If You Are Human, You Are Biased
Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life. —Erich Fromm, German psychologist and psychoanalyst
Interviews can be challenging to almost anybody and in almost any circumstance, but there are few circumstances more confronting than a medical school student admissions interview. Imagine. You have worked hard your whole life to be a good student, and even an elite student. Medical school admissions are among the most competitive processes people will ever face. Virtually every other candidate you are competing against has an outstanding résumé with exceptional grades. The interview process weighs heavy on people’s decisions because it often separates the merely good students from those who have the intelligence and the presence to be a good doctor.
The challenge, of course, is that interviews are subject to many unconscious biases based on any number of extraneous factors relating to the candidate being interviewed, the interviewer, and the environment in which the interview is being conducted. Two physicians at the University of Toronto, Donald Redelmeier and Simon Baxter, decided to explore one of these more extraneous factors.[1] They were curious about the observation as to how it seemed that prospective students interviewed on rainy days tended to get lower ratings in their interviews than people interviewed on sunny days.
Now I’m sure anybody reading this will agree that determining whether to accept students into medical school, or any other academic program for that matter, based on what the weather is on the particular day they are scheduled for interviews, is the height of folly. How absurd would it be to base a decision on whether to admit a student, based on something so obviously random and out of the student’s control?
Absurd, perhaps. Nonetheless, it happens.
Redelmeier and Baxter collected the results of medical school interviews that were conducted at the University of Toronto between 2004 and 2009. They compiled all of the scores from the interviews, almost all of which were conducted in the early spring. The scores ranged from 0 to 20.3. A score of 10 or less was considered “unsuitable,” 12 “marginal,” 14 “fair,” 16 “good,” 18 “excellent,” and 20 was considered “outstanding.” They then researched the Canadian National Climate Archive to track the weather on the days that the interviews were conducted.
Over the course of that time, Redelmeier and Baxter identified 2,926 candidates who were interviewed. The demographics of the interviewees were found to be unrelated to the results. However, those interviewed on rainy days were rated lower than those who were screened on sunny days. In fact, when they compared the results against the students’ scores on their primary testing mechanism, the Medical College Admission Tests (MCATs), they found that the difference in interview scores was equivalent to the students reducing their MCAT scores by 10 percent! Given the intense competition between high-performing applicants, this is enough to determine whether or not, or perhaps, “weather or not,” a student may get accepted, or even become a doctor at all.
Is it likely that interviewers responsible for choosing students for medical school were likely to have said to themselves, “It’s raining out so I think I’ll give this student a lower score,” or is it far more likely that they were unconscious to the impact that the weather made upon their mood? And the manner in which their mood influenced their perceptions of students? Most of us can certainly imagine that a bad weather day, dealing with traffic, and so forth, could impact our mood, and that our mood could impact an interview, but do we consider those influences when we are doing the evaluation of the person?
It is not a far stretch to consider that similar environmental or other concerns might affect us when we are conducting hiring interviews in business or making other business decisions, grading student papers, or determining hundreds of other choices, including those that are seemingly insignificant as well as very significant.
Unconscious influences dominate our everyday life. What we react to, are influenced by, see or don’t see, are all determined by reactions that happen deep within our psyche. Reactions which are largely unknown to us.
In a way, we all know this to be true. Most people have, at some point in their lives asked themselves what made them do or not do a certain thing. We find ourselves curious as to why we don’t always act in a way that is consistent with what we would like to do. Why do we eat too much, or lose patience with our loved ones, even as we had consciously appealed to our “higher” selves to do otherwise? We often have a hard time motivating ourselves