What our research demonstrates is that good intentions are not enough. Each of us needs to accept that we are biased and then take action to address our personal prejudices
Binna Kandola looks at how to overcome the prejudices we hide even from ourselves
Amazing as this may sound, it is possible to eliminate racial prejudice. More amazingly still, it may not be particularly difficult. At least, these are the conclusions of a research project I carried out with colleagues at the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield.
It’s common knowledge that there is a big disparity between the employment rate for ethnic minority Britons and that of the population generally. We also know that racial discrimination is a factor in this disparity. Where we struggle, though, is in working out what we can do about it. Legislation has made an impact, but not enough to change the statistics. Setting targets for the employment of minorities remains controversial. Organisations create policies and strategies and hope things will change, but mostly they don’t.
What all this tells me is that there is a general reluctance to recognise the part our emotions and prejudices play in decision-making. (I once sat on a government committee examining the disparities in employment rates between ethnic minorities and the rest of the population, where the chair – who was white – found it almost distasteful to talk about discrimination at all, never mind racism.)
The fact of the matter is we are all biased. Bias is related to identity and we relate more comfortably to people who have the same social identity as ourselves, while also displaying a related, opposing bias against people we see as different. How do we identify people like ourselves? Not surprisingly, factors such as sex and ethnicity are commonly used.
While such preferences would once have been openly expressed, we now live in very different times, with legal protection against discrimination as well as widespread moral condemnation of overt prejudice. It is therefore not surprising that most of us will want to hide any racist or sexist views we have from others. More interestingly, though, we may also hide them from ourselves.
When it comes to recruitment, this is a difficult problem to tackle. How can we make sure an employer is hiring on the basis of merit, not prejudice, when he or she may not even be conscious of their true motivation? Our work at the IWP has indicated a potential solution to this problem. As part of our research, we used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) – a computerised instrument which measures unconscious preferences and beliefs. It does this by asking people to pair two concepts, such as ‘young’ and ‘good’, or ‘elderly’ and ‘good’, to see whether they associate a particular condition with positive or negative connotations. If someone perceives the idea of ‘young’ as being ‘good’, for example, they will react more quickly to that combination than to one which links ‘elderly’ and ‘good’.
We used a group of over 100 professionals (mostly white) as participants in a project studying concepts of ‘race’ and ‘hiring’. The participants were shown a number of faces – some black, some white. They were also shown a selection of either hire-related words (such as accept or select) or fire-related words (reject, sack and so on). We wanted to see whether participants displayed a bias towards associating white faces with hiring and black faces with rejection. In addition, each participant also completed an anonymous paper and pencil test about explicit racial attitudes. The results of this test showed that, as a group, they did not see themselves as being racially prejudiced.
We split the sample into three groups. One group of participants was asked merely to complete the IAT. A second group was told to complete the test, but that in addition their goal was to be fair. A third group was also told to be fair and that the way to be fair was to react as quickly for a black face with ‘hire’ related words as they would for a white face.
The results were remarkable. The first group showed the highest level of racial bias towards white people. Among the second group, the level of bias was half that of the first, and the last group effectively displayed no bias at all.
There are a number of things worth drawing attention to here. Firstly, remember that this was a group of people who all, from the results of the paper and pencil test on race, believed they were fair minded and free from racial bias. Their test reaction times, however, suggested unconscious prejudice.
Secondly, it showed that having fairness as an explicit goal can reduce the degree to which we may hold and display bias.
Finally, it showed that a fairly straightforward mental orientation exercise can help us tackle our own unconscious biases.
Obviously, more research is needed, and we are working on that. Our second study is looking at gender stereotyping and the results appear very promising. The process we’ve used can also be applied to other forms of prejudice.
What it demonstrates is that good intentions are not enough. Each of us needs to accept that we are biased. We then need to take action to address our personal prejudices. Our research shows that spending a few minutes before making important decisions instructing ourselves on the importance of being fair can help us to produce just – and therefore better – decisions.
This is a new and potentially valuable line of enquiry into a difficult issue. The government and the various inquiries, commissions and agencies it has set up to investigate the problems of prejudice inevitably end up talking about the difficulty of dealing with ‘employer discrimination’. The solution is almost always seen as more legislation, but this leaves business leaders who participate in such investigations in a quandary. They know a solution is needed, but they don’t want more laws.
The result is always a recommendation along the lines that employers should reform themselves, with the suggestion that, if nothing changes, then the government should introduce stronger legislation in a few years’ time. In other words, a fudge that lacks any integrity whatsoever.
To deal with a problem, we have to understand it. We have an opportunity here to explore a hugely complex issue with some promise of positive solutions. The most amazing thing, however, is the lack of interest, thus far, from policy-makers and politicians. The sooner they realise that the psychology of prejudice may hold the key to dispelling it, the sooner we may be able to get practical and financial support for this important research.
Professor Binna Kandola is a senior partner at business psychology consultancy Pearn Kandola