Finding the Cure to Implicit Bias
Bias: A Brief Introduction
Depending on your definition of bias, it is almost everywhere; it’s why most tools are designed for larger hands, why stab vests are largely made for men and why a significant majority of clinical trials make no distinction between men and women. There’s also widespread bias in the medical profession with many black women in pain during pregnancy simply not being believed; we also shouldn’t forget that there have been many instances of bias in the criminal justice system in the US and the UK with some examples being less implicit and more explicit in nature.
Implicit bias refers to mental models which individuals may unknowingly use as a guide for taking an action. These mental models may rely on stereotypes or other types of association to help us make decisions about the world quickly and effectively whether that’s deciding to pull someone over as a police officer or putting someone through to a telephone interview. Sometimes these mental models work incredibly well as may be the case in nursing (see below) but often they lead to sub-optimal decision making, bias and, at times, outright racism.
Indeed, many will have diverse friendship groups and family connections which means they have multiple and varying examples of relative difference in their lives. These individuals are more likely to identify other positive examples of being amongst different people and less likely to assume that one individual is broadly representative of many. On the other hand, however, it’s possible that those with more limited experiences of people different from themselves are more likely to experience two biases in how they make summary judgements about others.
Whilst the availability heuristic helps experienced nurses make good decisions fast by turning to their medical knowledge and expertise, for those with limited experience of others, fewer samples will inform their judgement and so their decision might be less representative. As negative information weighs more heavily on the brain (negativity bias), it’s also likely that those examples will be negative too. What this means in practice is that those who encounter a different group of people less, are also less likely to be positively disposed toward them (perhaps pointing out the obvious).
Are We Really Fighting Bias?
Bias has become a big business over the past 25 years. Ever since the IAT was first developed (and before then, really), a plethora of organisations now offer services to help address implicit bias in organisations by providing bias training and workshops in all shapes and sizes. In some cases, interventions like The Gender By Us® Toolkit have delivered a “…small but positive effect…” in reducing implicit gender bias, and there is evidence to suggest that participation in diversity training can improve implicit associations about women in STEM disciplines amongst men. However, the impact of diversity training on implicit bias is hardly compelling and I think it’s high time a new approach was adopted: one where bias is seen largely as a function of the environment rather than the individual.
Bias as a Symptom
I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t try to help people be more understanding of implicit bias, their own biases or structural inequalities more broadly. Rather, I propose that we should also focus on environmental factors and perhaps more than we do currently. For example, in a study of nine interventions to reduce bias across 18 university campuses, bias scores remained mostly stable before and after indicating that there was something salient about life at these universities which meant racial biases prevailed.
Indeed, numerous studies have pointed to the importance of creating environments for changing perceptions. Women who attended a women’s college instead of a co-educational school were more likely to show interest in counter-stereotypic disciplines like maths and science in part due their proximity to a greater number of female faculty role models for those disciplines. Moreover, there’s also evidence to suggest the importance of context regarding priming effects, threatening environments or exposure to positive or negative exemplars of different people.
Changing Environments, Reducing Bias
It’s unlikely we’ll eradicate bias but we can do our best to better understand the causes of bias and, of course, ensure there are appropriate policies in place for dealing with its effects in organisations and society. Implicit bias is often triggered by an individual’s environment and other situational factors. If our environments can ‘nudge’ those individuals to make fairer tacit choices, then bias is likely to surface or be experienced by any individual overall and we’re collectively more likely to find a cure that works.
Some questions for Organisations and Recruitment Teams:
- Are you able to identify where bias occurs in your recruitment processes?
- In what environment do your recruiters work? Is their work environment high-pressured and more masculine in nature?
- How often do different teams get the opportunity to learn about each other and make new associations?
- Are you inadvertently priming some candidates for failure in testing scenarios? Reminding people of a stereotype can lead to poorer test performance.
- Do your employees get enough rest? Lack of sleep increases the likelihood of implicit bias.
- Do you use IATs as a diagnostic tool (to understand bias) or as cure (to ‘fix’ your teams)?
- Can you automate any tasks where implicit bias already exists?