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Personal Triggers
There are particular situations or triggers in which bias is more likely to happen. One of those situations has to do with you as a person. The way to think about it is that our brains only have so much space. There’s a lot of space, but there’s only but so much. And the more it’s being used up and we become what we call cognitively depleted or tired, then those are the situations in which bias is more likely to leak out. One of those situations is when we’re tired. Oftentimes when we’re working in a company, we’re making really important decisions on very little sleep. Another one of those contexts, it sounds very simple, but being in a good mood. There’s research showing that we’re much less likely to discriminate when we’re in a good mood in comparison to a bad mood.
Another one of these situations is when it is ambiguous: when it’s unclear what the right decision is, when there are performance evaluations, when you have to hire someone, and oftentimes when you have to fire someone. This is when bias is more likely to happen. So it’s the case when it’s ambiguous when we’re tired, or when we’re in a bad mood. These are some triggers when you should know, “Okay, I need to be more careful here than other times.”
Situational Triggers
Another instance in which we really need to be careful, we need to think about bias, is understanding the distinction between formal workplace situations and informal workplace situations. Today many workplaces are trying to create more informal workplace situations, retreats, having meetings in restaurants. And when it’s informal, oftentimes our guards are down. So this is great, because you can socialize with people. You can get to know people on a more personal basis, but this oftentimes is also the kind of situation in which bias is likely to occur. These are the moments when you might start asking people all kinds of personal questions that you might not realize they’re not necessarily appropriate.
Oftentimes it’s unfortunate, but I do a lot of work with LGBT groups. It’s usually in restaurants where people start asking them questions about their partner, or they might make a joke about LGBT groups, and they go, “Oh, you’re really cool. You know, you can take it.” This is typically what happens on these sort of off-hour times but not on these on-hour times. We don’t want to have our guard up all the time. We want to be friendly to our colleagues, but we just want to be aware that even in these informal situations, we need to be thinking or just cognizant about bias.
Four Ways to Combat Bias
There is no right recipe for every company and for every person. Different kinds of things are going to work. The first step is just awareness. Just being able to know that there’s a particular kind of situation in which you should think about bias. For example, I happen to be a professor, so I constantly think every time I’m interviewing undergraduates, I’m always thinking about gender bias. I’m always thinking about LGBT groups. I actually interviewed someone the other day who was from the South. One of the strongest stereotypes is that people from the South are seen as less intelligent because of the Southern accent. And he was talking really slow. And I thought to myself, he’s talking really slow. I am seeing that as a New Yorker that perhaps this is a moment where I might stereotype, and I was really aware of that. And actually, he wound up being amazing, and I wound up hiring him to work in my lab.
So just being aware of these situations and aware of what the stereotype is in the group, I think that’s one of the first key things. The second key thing is really being able to try to have conversations with people. If it is the case that you feel like you have engaged in some kind of micro-inequity, you called an Asian-American woman one name when it should have been another name. And oftentimes people really try to make these inequities disappear, and they go, “Oh, I’ll fix it the next time.” But taking a moment to go back and say, “I made a mistake.” You don’t have to turn it into a big deal, but just sort of recognizing that goes just such a long way in terms of so smoothing over any kinds of relationships.
There’s research showing that if you ask people to, instead of when they hire someone talk about all the reasons why you hired that person, merely explain why you didn’t hire the other people, just that switch alone reduces bias in half because now you have to go back and think about all of the reasons why you didn’t select someone. And oftentimes that forces you to sort of disentangle. Is it just someone I like or is it something about their clothes or is it something about where they’re from? That small change, which doesn’t cost anything, it doesn’t take any more work, dramatically reduces bias in half.
And for organizations, particularly at the level of hiring, one thing to think about is cluster hiring. Some of the research that we do in our own laboratory shows that just merely getting people to think about a group, to hire a group. So instead of hiring one person or promoting one person, hiring a group of people, a cluster of people, actually automatically gets you thinking about diversity and differences. You don’t have to talk about it. You don’t have to teach people about it. You just merely need to hire people in a group. That can lead you to start thinking about diversity as a reducing bias in a way where you don’t actually have to spend a lot of time talking about these conversations.