“It is much easier, as well as far more enjoyable, to identify and label the mistakes of others than to recognize our own. Questioning what we believe and want is difficult at the best of times, and especially difficult when we most need to do it, but we can benefit from the informed opinions of others.” — Daniel Kahneman
If you don’t want to unintentionally harm or anger your colleagues, if you don’t want to contribute to making your workplace an unfair or unreasonable environment, the first and perhaps most difficult part of your job is to become aware of your unconscious biases.
As Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman points out, “Acquisition of skills requires rapid and unequivocal feedback about the correctness of thoughts and actions.”
Here are some steps you can take to become aware of your own unconscious biases. (Subscribe to my Radical Respect newsletter to get tips every Thursday, and pre-order the book Radical Respect!)
1. Find your “bias busters”
2. Question false coherence
3. Be aware of how “small” things add up to a big thing
4. Manage your defensiveness
5. Be persistent
1. Find Your “Bias Busters”
I recommend explicitly asking people to be your “bias busters,” people who will be on the lookout for the things you say or do that reflect your unconscious biases. Word of warning: People who are from systemically advantaged groups are often in the majority or supermajority; when each person in the majority expects a person in the minority to educate them, it becomes burdensome. Often, people who are systemically advantaged do not recognize, compensate, or even appreciate their colleagues for doing this work.
So if you’re from a systemically advantaged group, don’t ask your colleagues who are not to point out your biases, unless you have a close enough relationship to be certain that this is not a burden to them, or unless it’s their job (for example, if they are on the DEI team at your company), or unless you are paying them as a consultant to do it.
If you’re not in a position to pay, you can share your openness to feedback with everyone, over- and underrepresented colleagues alike. But if people take you up on it, make sure you find other ways to reward the candor. Often, changing your behavior is the best reward. A thank-you is rarely enough.
It’s also essential to choose bias busters who are thoughtful, people whose judgment you trust and whom you can count on to act in good faith. Look for people who understand a wide range of perspectives. Don’t choose one person; choose a few.
You want a diverse set of people helping you to identify your biases.
Finally, don’t do this only once and assume you’ve attained self-knowledge: it’s a continuous process.
2. Question False Coherence
Our brains love to sort the chaos of life into various boxes and buckets and patterns. That’s what the brain does — automatically but not necessarily wisely. Daniel Kahneman teaches us to challenge the kind of false coherence our brains serve up. Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow describes how our brains process information along two tracks, which he defines as System 1, fast thinking, and System 2, slow thinking.
“System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.”
System 1 manages what happens when the light turns green. You put your foot on the gas without thinking. Someone presents you with a crossword puzzle or a calculus problem: System 2 takes over. Now you are working. Kahneman explains, “The defining feature of System 2 . . . is that its operations are effortful, and one of its main characteristics is laziness.” In other words, System 2 will defer to System 1, often when it shouldn’t. Unless you make a conscious effort to stop and think, System 1 and System 2 will conspire to avoid work that seems hard.
When System 2 over-delegates to System 1 — that is, when you rely on a stereotype instead of looking at the actual situation, or when you don’t stop and think even though the situation demands real thought — we get destructive biases. Sometimes System 2 lazily accepts the biases that System 1 energetically serves up.
It’s okay to defer to System 1 at the green light; not okay to defer to gender or racial bias when making a hiring decision. It takes discipline, effort, and self-awareness to question the assumptions we make and to understand that the categories we construct are often arbitrary. In other words, if we don’t want to get duped by our own brains, we must become conscious of our biases. That means learning to question them, and allowing others to question them, energetically.
3. Be Aware of How “Small” Things Add Up to a Big Thing
Sometimes the response to your bias may feel disproportionate to you. It seems like “no big deal” to you, but the other person is upset. You may be tempted to say, “Chill out,” or “Don’t overreact,” or “Don’t be hysterical.”
My advice to you? Don’t. Get curious, not furious. Be aware that your biased comment or action may be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Even though it’s not your fault that this person has experienced the same biased remark you just made five thousand times before you said it, you still need to attend to the harm done.
When you understand that what seems a small thing to you may feel like a repetitive stress injury or death by a thousand paper cuts to the other person, it will help you respond with more compassion.
This may be a simple acknowledgment about why what you said was problematic. And if you’re in a position to do so, offer to educate others on your team about the biased thing you just said or did so that this person doesn’t face the same old shit day after day.
4. Manage Your Defensiveness
When you mess up, as we all are bound to do, it’s natural to feel defensive. There’s no denying that it can be hard to accept being told the things you do or say are biased. You might feel as if the zipper to your soul has come undone, revealing a shameful flaw.
Or maybe you’re not so deeply ashamed, but you fear that the consequences will be severe. This defensiveness is natural. And it may indeed be risky in your environment to admit that what you said or did was biased. But remaining unaware of your biases is even riskier. Don’t hide from your mistakes. But don’t double down on them either and risk being like the guy in this cartoon by Sine Anahita.
You can’t do right if you don’t know what you’re doing wrong. So be open to learning about what you may be doing wrong and to correcting it.
5. Be Persistent
Changing biased behavior can be hard if that behavior has been your default. It may be that you’ve come to agree that referring to women as “guys” or “dudes” is not inclusive or accurate, but if you’ve been doing it your entire life, you may slip up or freeze at first as you attempt to change your default. Be patient with yourself — and even more persistent.
And remember, you may feel worse before you feel better.
Recently, I got some feedback that I tend to use language that assumes everyone identifies as either a man or a woman, an assumption that is both incorrect and harmful to people who are nonbinary.
Shortly thereafter, I went on a live podcast and found myself saying, “Whether you are a man or a woman.” I suddenly became aware I was doing it again, so I added, “Or whether you are . . . ,” and then I couldn’t retrieve the word nonbinary. I felt like a damn fool. Luckily, the host knew what I meant, filled in the word I’d forgotten, and we continued our conversation. It was embarrassing to find myself at a loss for words so publicly, but that was better than not attempting to make a change.
We all have to forgive ourselves for the mistakes we’ll surely make when changing bad habits of speech from childhood or using a colleague’s pronoun changes or any other change that causes us to change a deeply ingrained but incorrect pattern of thought or speech. And we have to be persistent with ourselves. The key is not to give up.
It is easy to feel utterly paralyzed by the awareness of the sheer volume of your newly discovered biases. In these moments, it can be helpful to do three things:
• Run the numbers
• Think of a person you care about
• Think about how bias busting improves your work
RUN THE NUMBERS
Breeze Harper, one of my bias busters, suggested I would benefit from thinking more deeply about the following words: lame, color-blind, blind, see, moron, psychopath, male, female.
What was my response? “Oh my God, every word in the English language is going to offend someone. There are no words I can use!” That kind of hyperbole is a common deflection technique.
Analysis is the solution to hyperbole. When I stopped to count, I realized that there are over 170,000 words in the English language. Breeze had suggested I rethink my sloppy use of eight words. This math helped me gain some perspective.
THINK OF A PERSON YOU CARE ABOUT
Abstract “shoulds” can feel exhausting. Thinking instead about specific people you care about who will benefit from your efforts can re-energize you.
Three of the words that Breeze suggested I stop using were sight metaphors. Zach Shore, a historian who helped me edit this book, is blind. My first motivator to quit using language harmful to people who are blind was a desire to honor Zach, whom I admire. He never mentioned my use of ableist language. And as the person harmed, he shouldn’t have to.
He chooses to focus his energy on making a dent in the stubbornly high 70% unemployment rate among people who are blind and getting more of these folks interacting with people who can see.
I’d been unaware how often I was using ableist language and was glad Breeze had educated me. I thought I was aware and addressing the problem. But when I finished this book, I did a search on the word see.
Guess how many times I’d used this word thoughtlessly? Ninety-nine times! When another bias buster read this, she pointed out another sloppy metaphor that is all too common and that I wasn’t aware of: blinders. We all have a lot to learn.
THINK ABOUT HOW BIAS BUSTING IMPROVES YOUR WORK
Once I started making changes, I realized the sentences flowed better when I substituted the more accurate word. In the end, making the change improved the quality of my work. It probably benefited me more than people who are blind. I point this out not because I think that self-interest is a more significant motivator than altruism but because there can be arrogance in altruism.
You may not be a writer, but you may find that you make better promotion decisions, for example, when you are aware of not using biased language. You may find you sell more of your products when you eliminate biases about your customers, when you hire a team whose demographics mirror those of your customers.
Becoming more aware of our biases pushes us to think more clearly. It’s work, but we get more out of it than we put into it. A refusal to keep learning is like a child who says, “I know my addition tables. I don’t need to bother with multiplication.”
