The Debiasing Effort in Organisations — A Look Inside the Brain
Across eons of evolutionary change, the unconscious mind has been molded into an efficient learning machine, one that fills in the blanks for us — or, what psychologists refer to as cognitive heuristics. As much as these heuristics served a purpose for our earlier hominoid ancestors, the resulting psychological blind spots may be less ideal for life in the modern world, often leading to biases in our social interactions and daily decisions.
Businesses are starting to join in on the science. Google, in recognizing some of these cognitive shortcomings, has taken an active stance to mitigate bias in the workplace. Their slogan, “Debiasing our biases,” is not a mere HR tagline, but instead points to what we know about the sheer capacity of our cultural (i.e., learning) brain: We are in the driver’s seat of our evolutionary change, which is to say, the biases we’ve inherited can actually be reversed through learning. We can in fact, debias our biases.
When it comes to workplace behaviors, understanding how these social biases can be brought to consciousness, then controlled and overridden, is critical to the wellbeing of individual employees, as well as the success of organizations. For instance, management research has consistently demonstrated that diversity in teams is necessary for collective and individual success (e.g., Richard, 2000). Diversity comes in many forms — cultural, ethnic, gender, status, experiential, educational, etc. — but no matter what form it comes, the chief benefit of diversity is simple: exposure to different viewpoints and perspectives heightens performance. Not to make this article all about Google, but it’s probably no surprise that Google’s success can be attributed to their hiring practices and how much they focus on creating environments of diversity.
The Stubbornness of Our Biases
Unfortunately, our unconscious biases often stand in the way of our openness to new experiences and people. As much as the debiasing efforts of businesses are making headway, these evolutionarily ancient systems have proven stubborn. Perhaps most dangerous of all, they lead to a sort of primal group psychology — the quick and easy differentiation between “us” and “them,” the parochial comfort of belonging to one group that is altogether separate from “the other.”
From a social side, we know this type of thinking inculcates prejudice, discrimination, and hostile derogation; that is, we know biases are bad for the targeted others. But there’s another monster lurking under the muddy waters of our old psychology. Scientific evidence suggests biases are also bad for the biased person. Nick’s own brain science research (study HERE) has shown that being biased can be detrimental to a person’s own brain functioning. The findings of the study indicate that such group biases are capable of disrupting a core signal in the unconscious brain that is responsible for self-guided adaptive learning.
As we’ll further explain, what this shows is that the debiasing aim is a tricky endeavour. Reversing biases tied to objective behavior is easy because behavior itself is explicit and observable (and therefore amenable to change). But, so much of what we do is driven by unconscious processes and invisible brain computations, and often it’s here where our biases carry out their dastardly deeds. What do these implicit processes look like and what sort of effects do they have? To answer these questions, we must look to neuroscience experiments.
The Experiment — Red Shirts vs. Blue Shirts
Here’s how the study worked. Researchers first created an artificial intergroup context in the lab by arbitrarily placing participants into two groups — the red-shirts and blue-shirts. Importantly, the “minimal grouping”, as it’s referred to by social psychologists, was based on a trivial categorization — how many dots people counted in an image.
(An important aside: Why minimal groups instead of actual groups? This lab trick, used for several decades now, allows researchers to create a novel “us versus them” social dynamic, and as a result, to control for any pre-established group features like ethnicity, age, gender, religion, and so on. Controlling for all these outside variables offers a powerful and conservatively rigorous experimental test of the hypotheses: By observing the presence of an effect, like a behavior, emotion, or, in our case, a brain signal, you can safely and precisely attribute that effect to the ingroup/outgroup factor that you have manipulated. And with this, the researcher can now move beyond correlation and begin making claims of causality. In a word, this is science.)
Back to the study. After the groupings, people completed two rounds of a performance learning task — once while being observed by an ingroup member (red shirts) and once while being observed by an outgroup member (blue shirts). To incentivize performance, they were told the better they did, the more money they would earn. Participants’ neural patterns were tracked and recorded while receiving learning feedback. Specifically, researchers investigated the signal in the brain associated with adaptive learning and goal regulation. Let’s call it the learning signal.
The Results — A Dulled Learning Signal
Results show that when participants were doing the task in the presence of an ingroup member, their brain’s learning signal appeared normal, as it always does when people perform on their own (if anything, the signal was heightened). But, when participants did the same task in front of an outgroup member, this same signal (in the same brains) was significantly diminished. What’s more, the effect was amplified in those people whose biases were strongest. For them, the neural signal was effectively turned off when being monitored by an outgroup member.
This puzzling neural patterning can be explained by the fact that we care much less about what outgroup members think about us and our behavior. However, when ingroup members are observing us, we monitor our behavior much more, because we care a great deal more about impression formation. It is this lack of motivational interest in being watched by an outgroup member that caused this critical learning signal in the brain to become muted. This hints at the idea that a person is willing to harbor biases against others even if it means doing so comes at a personal cost of impaired brain functioning. That’s how stubborn biases can be.
Fortunately, there’s a silver-lining to be found. The minimal groups that were created in the study consisted of both males and females from different ethnic, religious, and educational backgrounds. The fact that we created biases through these ad-hoc groups, erasing the basis of what drives real-life prejudice, tells us that these biases can be turned on and off, and that we can change the deeply wired brain signals through our own choosing. With the right frame of mind, we can debias even the most stubborn of biases.
Implications for the Workplace
In the modern workplace, diversity in teams is the key to organizational success. And in any workplace, employees need to put their best foot forward for individual and collective benefit. But if they harbor certain unconscious biases while attempting to perform in a diverse team, they’ll end underperforming and under-learning, ultimately hurting themselves in the end.
To take this a little bit further, it is the authors’ suggestion that teams within organizations take the time and effort to monitor team performance over time to determine how often the team dynamic would need a shake-up. Phenomena like groupthink have a propensity to strengthen over time when teams become too stagnant in changing their dynamic, and this can lead to increased bias, and ultimately, to the detriment of the group. To do this, organizations need to be honest with themselves and do two things: 1) develop a management scorecard taking bias into account that can track, as objectively as possible, team performance; and 2) continually expose the scrutiny of this scorecard to external parties (e.g. consultants) to ensure it is incorporating key performance indicators that are relevant.
Taking the view of the individual, it’s worth highlighting the need for some of us to look beyond the comfort of our own employers once in a while and looking for opportunities to move into a new job. This can offer an immediate opportunity for us to debias some of our past-held biases. In a more dramatic fashion, one of the most impactful methods one could employ would not only involve moving to a new employer, but to move to a different country as well.
Moving forward, ridding ourselves of bias in the workplace means good things all around, and finding the connections that exist between all of us will help the brain make its own connections in our learning and performance. So let’s be conscious of our biases, and let’s allow our brains to be the best they can be in every performance situation.
