Ways to End Bias That Will Also Make You Happier | Jessica Nordell
Dan Harris speaks with science and culture journalist Jessica Nordell, author of "The End of Bias," about why humans evolved biases, the physiological impact of challenging them, and effective personal and institutional strategies, including mindfulness and studying history, to overcome unconscious bias.
Deep Dive Analysis
16 Topic Outline
Journalist's Personal Encounter with Bias
Bias as an Interaction and Cultural Story
Stereotyping as an Addictive Intermittent Reward Cycle
The Difficulty of Self-Reflection on Bias
Personal Experience with Feedback and White Fragility
How Bias Harms the Perpetrator and Creates Disconnection
Jessica's Journey in Recognizing Her Own Sexism
Dan's Experience with Gender Bias in His Company
Ineffective Strategies for Combating Bias
Effective Individual Strategies: Awareness, Motivation, and Replacement
The Role of Mindfulness and Loving-Kindness Meditation
Building Relationships Across Lines of Difference
The Contact Hypothesis and Conditions for Reducing Prejudice
The Power of Studying History to Understand Bias
Organizational Strategies for Reducing Bias
Motivation's Impact on Diversity and Performance
7 Key Concepts
Bias as an Interaction
Bias isn't just one person projecting onto another; it's a dynamic, complex interaction where how one person treats another affects the response, which in turn affects the initial person's response, creating a feedback loop. This means people often respond to cultural stories or 'hallucinations' about groups rather than the actual person.
Stereotyping as Addiction
Stereotyping can be like an addiction because it involves predicting behavior. When predictions are correct, the brain experiences a reward. If predictions are wrong, it can be jarring. This intermittent reward cycle, similar to how phones are addictive, makes stereotyping a hard habit to break.
White Fragility (as defined by D'Angelo)
This concept refers to an inability to tolerate racial stress, often rooted in an unexplored but felt sense of horror and shame. It describes how white people can get stuck in denial and struggle to move through the emotional stages of grief to acceptance and positive action when confronted with their own biases or the historical inheritance of racism.
Homophily
Homophily literally means 'love of the same.' It describes a key human bias where people are susceptible to choosing those who are a lot like themselves, whether in hiring, friendships, or living arrangements. Recognizing this tendency is important for intentionally seeking out diversity.
Contact Hypothesis
Developed by Gordon Alport, this hypothesis suggests that certain conditions must be met for interactions between different groups to decrease prejudice. These conditions include equal status among participants, cooperation toward a common goal, and the imprimatur of an institutional authority validating the interaction.
Marley Hypothesis
Named after Bob Marley, this hypothesis suggests that understanding history helps people understand where they are coming from. Research shows that learning about historical injustices, like discriminatory housing policies, helps individuals acknowledge and understand present-day racism more clearly.
Psychological Safety
This concept describes the feeling within a team or organization where everyone feels willing and able to speak up without fear of negative consequences. It is identified as the crucial link between diversity and actual performance benefits, as it allows diverse perspectives to be integrated and conflict to be resolved constructively.
6 Questions Answered
Humans evolved to have biases because stereotyping, which involves predicting behavior, provides a feeling of reward when those predictions are confirmed. This intermittent reward cycle makes it an addictive and deeply ingrained human activity.
When people interact with someone who violates a stereotype, they can respond as though they are experiencing cardiovascular threat, indicating that having expectations violated can be unpleasant or jarring.
Believing one is objective or claiming to be 'colorblind' or 'genderblind' does not work. Research shows that dwelling on one's own objectivity can actually increase bias, and 'colorblindness' in organizations leads employees of color to detect more discrimination.
Effective strategies include increasing awareness and motivation to change, using replacement strategies like looking for alternative explanations for behavior, developing meaningful relationships with people from other groups, practicing mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation, studying history, and persisting after making mistakes.
Meditation can indirectly reduce bias by decreasing stress, cognitive load, and improving emotional regulation, all of which exacerbate bias. Directly, some research suggests loving-kindness meditation can erode the strong distinction between self and other, and it is known to create more other-directed altruistic behavior.
Organizations can reduce bias by analyzing existing policies and practices to identify where bias shows up (e.g., hiring, promotions), developing structured and transparent criteria for decision-making, and fostering psychological safety. The fundamental motivation for diversity must be a belief that diverse perspectives are essential to the company's functioning and a source of wealth.
12 Actionable Insights
1. Practice Self-Reflection & Introspection
Engage in self-reflection and introspection to observe your own thoughts, habits, and patterns of mind, especially those that violate your values. This practice, though challenging, helps you hold these patterns more loosely and pause before acting on immediate reactions.
2. Persist After Mistakes
Recognize that making mistakes is an inevitable part of working against bias and discrimination. The most crucial step is to persist after a misstep, moving through feelings of shame, guilt, or defensiveness towards acceptance and positive action.
3. Understand Personal Harm from Bias
Shift your perspective from seeing bias as only harming others to understanding how perpetuating unexamined prejudices also harms you. This includes creating disconnection, separation from reality, and a ‘heart hardening’ that leads to personal stress and a less authentic existence.
4. Study History of Bias
Delve into the history of racism and patriarchy to understand the origins and trajectory of these ’toxic lies.’ This historical knowledge can help you see present-day bias more clearly, understand its cultural invention, and reduce its grip on your own mind.
5. Undergo Bias Intervention Training
Seek out evidence-based bias intervention training that boosts awareness, increases motivation, and provides concrete strategies to combat bias. Such training has been shown to effectively change people’s behavior in real-world contexts.
6. Look for Alternative Explanations
When you catch yourself making an assumption about someone’s behavior based on a stereotype, actively look for alternative explanations for their actions. This strategy helps interrupt automatic biased thinking.
7. Practice Mindfulness and Meditation
Regularly engage in mindfulness and meditation practices to improve emotional regulation, decrease stress, and reduce cognitive load. These benefits indirectly reduce the likelihood of acting on biases, which are exacerbated by stress and dysregulation.
8. Practice Loving-Kindness Meditation
Engage in loving-kindness meditation to foster more altruistic responses and potentially erode the strong distinction between self and other. Research suggests it can lead to more similar brain responses when viewing oneself versus others.
9. Cultivate Relationships Across Differences
Intentionally seek opportunities to develop meaningful, cooperative relationships with people from different social identity groups. Ensure these interactions occur under conditions of equal status, shared goals, and institutional support to effectively decrease prejudice.
10. Implement Structured Decision Criteria (Organizations)
For organizations, develop and use structured, consistent, and transparent criteria for making decisions, such as hiring or promotions. This formal approach helps to decrease the influence of homophily and unconscious bias on outcomes.
11. Align Diversity Motivation (Organizations)
Organizations should fundamentally believe that diverse perspectives are essential to their functioning and a source of wealth, rather than just for justice or business opportunities. This core motivation enables better conflict resolution, learning, and overall performance from diversity.
12. Foster Psychological Safety (Organizations)
Cultivate an environment of psychological safety within teams and organizations where everyone feels willing and able to speak up and learn from one another. This is the crucial link that allows diversity to become a huge resource for better performance.
6 Key Quotes
We're not responding to one another as human beings. We're actually responding to the culture's story about the group, whatever group is operational in the moment, to which we belong.
Dan Harris
I started thinking of it as responding like more to a daydream or a hallucination than an actual person because the culture has so many messages and so many false ideas, some true ideas, a lot of false ideas about different groups of people. And it's all in play, I think, during that interaction.
Jessica Nordell
The most important step in the process of working against bias and discrimination is persisting after a mistake, persisting after a misstep, being able to experience the emotional difficulty and all of the emotions that go through one, shame, guilt, defensiveness, anger, you know, all of these feelings, and then being able to move through it and move toward acceptance and that positive action.
Jessica Nordell
White supremacy is a delusion and it harms white people because it causes them to be trapped in a delusion. There's a philosopher named Charles Mills who says one of the ironies of white supremacy is that white people have created a world that they cannot understand.
Jessica Nordell
To force yourself, again, probably subconsciously, to not see the inequities and inequities in our society leads to a kind of heart hardening that creates stress for you and disconnection. And that it's subtle, but that's a real pain that white people or anybody in a dominant or privileged group is carrying.
Lama Rod Owens (quoted by Dan Harris)
You think you're thinking your thoughts, but actually you're thinking the culture's thoughts.
Krishnamurti (quoted by Sabine Selassie, referenced by Dan Harris)
3 Protocols
Bias Intervention Workshop (Patricia Devine)
Jessica Nordell- Provide material to boost awareness of how bias works and its serious impact.
- Increase motivation to change biased behaviors.
- Offer a palette of replacement strategies, such as looking for alternative explanations for a person's behavior when making assumptions.
- Encourage developing meaningful relationships with people of other groups.
Conditions for Decreasing Prejudice (Contact Hypothesis)
Jessica Nordell- Ensure equal status among people from different groups during interaction.
- Facilitate cooperation toward a common goal.
- Obtain the imprimatur of an authority or institutional authority, signaling that the interaction is acceptable and supported.
Organizational Bias Reduction Strategy
Jessica Nordell- Analyze existing organizational policies and practices to identify where bias shows up (e.g., hiring, promotions, interpersonal interactions).
- Establish clear, structured, consistent, and transparent criteria for making decisions, especially those prone to homophily (e.g., hiring).
- Ensure that the fundamental motivation for diversity is rooted in the belief that diverse perspectives are essential to the company's functioning and a source of wealth, rather than solely for justice or business opportunities.