What’s the first thing you do when you wake up on a workday morning? Maybe you hit the snooze button, or check your phone. Maybe you’re a morning person and you jump out of bed. Your routine may vary depending on the day of the week but, overall, nothing could be more mundane… or so you thought.
As far as you knew, there was nothing hidden in your decision to take a shower before you had breakfast. The fact that you often fixed someone else’s breakfast before your own made perfect sense. What could be simpler, you thought, than your decision to brush your teeth just before you sped out the door? It all made sense to you, before I asked you the following question:
What foot, right or left, did you put your shoe on first this morning?
It’s our own feet we’re talking about here, and we were the ones to shimmy them into our shoes. We should know the answer to this question. But I don’t know which shoe I put on first today. Do you?
This question is what comes to mind when I think about implicit bias, which is defined as “subconscious beliefs that affect our behavior towards others”. To me, implicit bias is the force behind my subconscious decision-making, hidden amongst what I consider routine. Implicit bias exists for everyone, and it’s a factor in the societal behaviors we wish we could change. It also, despite how we may feel about it, exists for a good reason.
The Purpose and Practice of Implicit Bias
What I understand about the results of the research regarding implicit bias is this: when we’re babies, our survival depends on our ability to bond with our caretakers and to associate our caretakers with food, protection, and love. We’re born primed with the ability to associate, and we become masters at it in just a few years. Then, as we grow, our environments reinforce (or in some cases shift – but more on that later) our associations.
Through this practice, and all the while on a subconscious level, we learn that our ability to associate enables us to navigate our world. When we go to a restaurant for the first time, we learn that the adult who approaches our table with an apron and a notepad will take our order and bring our food. As young children, we make similar associations regarding our teachers and people in uniforms. Here again, our environment influences us. Are most of our teachers women? Are most of the people wearing uniforms, like police and fire-fighter uniforms, men?
Let’s return to our typical workday morning, on our hurried drive to work. We see a pedestrian waiting for traffic to stop before she can cross a crosswalk. Do we stop so that she can cross? Why not? If we decide not to stop, a crosswalk study conducted in Las Vegas indicates that our decision is not based entirely on our impatience, or on our urge to skirt traffic laws. In the study, drivers stopped less for a black woman crossing the street than they did for a white woman. This disturbing outcome indicates that our decision may be based on a lifetime of subconscious associations, otherwise known as implicit biases. The study also shows us the importance of pursuing our biases and bringing them to light.
How to Identify Implicit Bias in Your Daily Work Routine
In a staff meeting, how do you choose where to sit? Are you more likely to sit next to a co-worker who is more like a friend, someone who appeals to your personal self, or next to someone who is different from you in appearance and beliefs? Which co-workers do you most often go to lunch with, and which co-workers would you never think to ask? Why? Asking myself these questions has helped me identify my implicit biases.
If you were a hiring manager, you would say that you based your decisions to interview or hire someone on each candidate’s qualifications. But, multiple studies on implicit bias in the recruiting process have shown that men are the favored candidates. We could attribute this to the entrenched patriarchy, but in a Yale University study, female scientists trained in objectivity were still more likely to hire men over women.
Can We Cure Implicit Bias?
When I first heard about implicit bias, and how it may affect my career, I thought that awareness was the cure. I thought that if I identified my subconscious motivations, I could steer my thoughts in a new direction. However, according to Dr. Jordan Axt, a researcher with the University of Virginia, awareness makes little difference.
In an interview on the Innovation For All podcast, Dr. Axt debunked the premise that awareness counteracted implicit bias, and he didn’t stop there. Dr. Axt said that even continuous exposure to diverse groups was not enough to change our hidden mindset. In other words, even if we lived in a diverse neighborhood, or worked for a company with a diverse workforce, our subconscious beliefs regarding others would remain. Sensitivity training provided by employers did make a positive difference, but the infrequency of these trainings meant that the positive effects were short-lived.
Why are our implicit biases resistant to change? This question brings me back to what I said earlier about how, as children, our home environments shaped our outlook on life, as we formed our first bonds and associations. At some point, we compared our households to our communities and to what we saw in books, movies, and on TV. Our hungry young brains, eager to make sense of the world and find our place in it, looked for patterns and generalities. What we observed in our neighborhoods and culture shaped us in a near-permanent way.
According to Shankar Vedantam, author of The Hidden Brain, the trends in race and gender that we observed as children became the basis of our understanding, despite (in some cases) the groups to which we ourselves belong. Evidence of this can be seen in word/face association experiments with young Canadian children, which Mr Vedantam highlights in his book. When shown pictures of adult faces, the children in the experiments associated white adult faces with positive words more often than they did for pictures of black adult faces. When looking for the cause, researchers found no correlation between the children’s parent’s views and the children’s responses. More research is needed to determine the cause, but I surmise that a young mind’s repeated exposure to societal “norms,” plays an important role.
What You Can Do About Your Own Implicit Biases
If you’re curious about your own hidden beliefs, you can visit the website for Project Implicit, a non-profit organization (which includes Dr. Axt) dedicated to uncovering the pervasiveness of implicit bias. Project Implicit provides tests that anyone can take to measure their own biases.
From what I can tell, Dr. Axt hopes that by promoting the study of our hidden beliefs, he will encourage long-term shifts in our thinking about implicit biases. Based on his findings, I now believe that if sensitivity training was a regular, frequent part of employee training, the positive effects would be longer-lived. But we don’t need to wait for our employers to provide this training — there is something that we can do today to counteract our implicit bias, and benefit more than just our careers.
Dr. Axt conveyed that there was one practice that counteracted our bias-driven behavior towards others: close, long-term friendships or bonds with those from other groups. So, to benefit your life, career, and community, get out of your routine. Make a new and different long-term friend. Join a diverse group with the intent of becoming a long-standing member. If we cannot change our thoughts, let’s change our behavior — and let’s make our choice to do so explicit, rather than hidden.