Everyday Bias. Howard J. Ross
biases for a reason. Imagine if you didn’t have any biases and you went out into the world. How would you know whether somebody approaching you was “friendly” or not? How would you determine how to relate to different circumstances? If somebody approached you with a knife in their hand, raised high in the air, would you look at them and say, “I wonder what that is and what you plan to do with it?” or would you immediately switch into “fight or flight” mode and defend yourself?
To manage and negotiate an extremely complex and busy world, we have developed the capacity to compartmentalize things and people we are exposed to on a regular basis. We put them in observable categories so we can quickly determine how they fit into our background of experience and then determine what we can expect from them in the future. Gender, race, sexual orientation, age, and so on, are all such categories. For instance, it makes it easier to know that somebody with gray hair is likely older, as opposed to not having any idea of the age of the person with whom we are dealing. It is not a big jump, then, for the mind to associate qualities and values to those categories, for example: good or bad; right or wrong; smart or stupid; safe or unsafe.
One of the most powerful ways we do this is by creating stereotypes. We begin to learn how to “read” different kinds of people. As we encounter them, we instantly compare them to other people we have encountered before. Were the others friendly, safe, and welcoming? If so, then we are likely to feel comfortable with these individuals. On the other hand, were the others hostile or unfriendly? Then the mind sends a different message: Be careful! Stereotypes provide a shortcut that helps us navigate through our world more quickly, more efficiently, and, our minds believe, more safely.
Of course, even when we haven’t encountered a particular kind of person before, we may have the same judgments and assessments based on things that we have heard or learned about “people like that.” As far back as 1906, William Graham Sumner, the first person to hold an academic chair in sociology at Yale University, identified the phenomenon of “in-group/out-group bias.” Sumner wrote that “each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exists in its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders.”[6] This phenomenon is magnified when the “in” group is the dominant or majority culture in a particular circumstance. Because the dominant cultural group in any environment usually creates the standard and acceptable norms and behaviors for that group, people from nondominant groups often will be seen as “different,” “abnormal,” “less than,” or even “sick” or “sinful.” Business cultures, to cite one example, are generally male dominant. Most business leaders are overwhelmingly male. The cultures of companies have largely been around from a time when even more men were in leadership. This has created a male-dominated cultural model in most businesses. And yet most men don’t look at their business cultures as wanting things to be done in “a man’s way.” They see it as wanting things to be done “the right way,” without even realizing that, in their unconscious minds, the “right way” and “the man’s way” are virtually synonymous.
If we were to look at this thinking objectively, we could see a certain logic to it. If you were creating a mind and evolving it over the course of millennia, would it make more sense for that mind to be more sensitive, in encountering new people and experiences, to things that are potentially pleasant or things that are potentially dangerous? The obvious answer is that the one that might kill me is more important to spot than the one that might give me a “nice surprise.” When we do not know much about this person, or these people, they can become potentially dangerous to us. Until proven otherwise. We are programmed to notice that potential threat before we notice “friend.” To notice potential “danger” before we notice potential “pleasure.” It helps keep us alive.
This isn’t limited to people. We stereotype all kinds of things to try to figure them out. We see something and our mind automatically sorts it, consciously or unconsciously saying, “that reminds me of . . .” as a way of identifying what we are dealing with at that moment. Pelham has studied this pattern of behavior, even as we relate to dogs.[7] If you show people pictures of a bulldog, a sheepdog, a poodle, and a pointer, and ask them which is “loyal,” “prissy,” “persistent,” or “clumsy,” you will get the same answers almost every time. Some of these stereotypes have even become part of our language (e.g., “he was as persistent as a bulldog!”). Of course we might say these are common characteristics in these breeds, but not every dog in any breed acts the same way, yet we still make the assumption. It is quicker and easier that way, and much more efficient for our brains. And it is mostly unconscious. While we have tended to look at the dynamics of unconscious bias most particularly concerning racial and gender identity, unconscious bias patterns exist in all areas of life and are influenced by factors that might surprise us. For example, it is no surprise that we make certain decisions based on our hand dominance. We may sit in a certain place because we are right-handed or left-handed and don’t want to be constantly bumping up against the person next to us. All of that makes sense. But a study from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands seems to show that our responses to hand dominance may influence us more than we think.
In the study, which was led by Daniel Casasanto, researchers found that not only do people tend to choose more toward their dominant hand (in other words, if you are right-handed, you are more likely to choose something on your right side than on your left), but that we also respond to others based on their use of one hand or another.[8] In addition, we may be able to read people’s positive and negative attitudes based on the hands they inadvertently use.
“In laboratory tests, right- and left-handers associate positive ideas like honesty and intelligence with their dominant side of space and negative ideas with their non-dominant side,” said Casasanto. “Right- and left-handers were found to associate positive ideas like intelligence, attractiveness, and honesty with their dominant side and negative ideas with their non-dominant side.” The researchers also analyzed the speeches of politicians to determine whether or not this pattern played out. Studying the 2004 and 2008 American presidential elections, they tracked 3,012 spoken clauses and 1,747 gestures from the four presidential candidates, two of whom were right-handed (John Kerry and George Bush), and two of whom were left-handed (Barack Obama and John McCain). In both cases, the dominant hand was more associated with positive statements and the non-dominant more associated with negative ones. In other words, if the candidate was right-handed, they used their right hand to gesture when they made a positive statement, and vice versa.
Now imagine hiring somebody because they happen to sit in the chair on the right side of your desk versus the one on the left side of your desk. That would be kind of a crazy way to decide who to hire, wouldn’t it? And, of course, in addition to being patently unfair to the person who happened to be on “your wrong side,” it also is a terrible way to make a talent management decision. Your chances of getting the best person have been reduced to a dice roll.
For the most part we have largely thought about bias from the standpoint of those incidents where people have a negative bias against somebody, which then has a destructive impact on that person’s chances to be successful (e.g., a woman who doesn’t get hired for a job because somebody has a negative gender bias about women). However, it is much more complex than that.
These destructive uses of biases against a certain group (Q1 in figure 1.1) are the ones we have focused most of our attention. We have, in fact, created laws to be sure that people are not discriminated against in this way. But they are not the only ways that bias plays out in our daily lives.
As odd as it may seem, there also are constructive uses of biases against certain groups (Q2 in figure 1.1). They can benefit us in many ways. We determine that people who have aggressive personality types might not be the best fit for a customer service job. Or that people who don’t have certain technology skills and background won’t be a good match for a job that requires computer proficiency. If we didn’t have these filters, hiring would be almost oppressive, because we would start with a huge number of résumés and have to look at all of them more carefully than time might allow.
I know that many people