Reframing how we deal with inherent bias

In an earlier post I reflected upon how the practice of law runs on trust, and how trust is also essential in practicing Belonging. To truly belong at their law firm, lawyers must trust that their firm values and needs them back, and will remain true to its values.

So, I had “trust” on my mind when I recently picked up the Claude M. Steele’s new book, Churn:  The Tension That Divides Us and How to Overcome It.  In Churn, Steele revisits his exploration in Whistling Vivaldi of how stereotype threats arise and impact us.  But this time, Steele homes in on our physical and mental reactions to such threats, how those reactions distract and derail us, and what to do about it. 

“Churn is the mental agitation and physical stress we can experience in diverse settings.”  The immediate cause of churn “is stereotype or identity threat – the threat of being judged and treated badly based on negative stereotypes about our identities….” Perhaps the most intense churn arises concerning race, triggered by old stereotypes of Black and Brown inferiority or of White racism. But harmful stereotypes abound about gender, age, ethnicity, and on and on. Each of us can, in our own ways, experience stereotype threats. And because our social identities are different, it follows that the stereotypes themselves, the history and power contexts for such stereotypes, the circumstances that trigger our feeling such threats, and the intensity of our churn also differ.

Steele recounts what decades of social science has documented, that such threats trigger both physical stress and distracting thoughts (worrying about how others may judge you by the stereotype, monitoring yourself for any behaviors that might confirm the stereotype, second-guessing the other person’s intent, and so forth). Churn causes us to multi-task in an acutely distracting way, which can demonstrably worsen our performance. Churn can also make being in a diverse setting highly uncomfortable and even undesirable. No wonder it feels easier to retreat to non-diverse settings, largely free from such stereotype threats and the resulting churn.

Then Steele reframes the issue:

For Steele, the antidote for churn is trust:

I find this fascinating. We undoubtedly each carry with us the baggage of inherent biases. As Anaïs Nin put it, “We don’t see things as they are.  We see things as we are.”  And it is time well-spent to become more aware of how such biases can unconsciously or unintendedly skew our perspectives and actions. Yet frankly, this is a tall order. It requires us to constantly monitor and mitigate our unconscious, to the extent that is even practicable. It’s also committing ourselves to a negative – “I will work hard to avoid thinking/doing X.” Merely avoiding something, without a positive alternative to replace that something, is a difficult path for successfully altering our thinking and behavior.

What Steele suggests with his reframing is that, while we should of course continue being vigilant about restraining our inherent biases, we should also focus on something positive – building trust across differences, to diffuse churn.   

What can organizations do to instill such trust at the outset, in circumstances that would otherwise fester with stereotype threats?  Steele focuses on seeing, welcoming, and supporting.

Seeing:  “the effort to foster trust in diverse settings … is  likely to be incomplete without seeing, without, as much as possible, walking in the shoes of the people involved.” Truly seeing others and their lived experiences helps us be effective in welcoming and supporting them. Also, people want to be truly seen, and when they can see that we truly want to see them, trust is built.

Welcoming:  “it’s especially important that welcoming be inclusive ….  [P]eople must feel, at the outset, that they can be valued, can contribute, and can in some way succeed.” Steele notes that such messages are best framed in ways that resonate with the lived experiences and positive values of others. He also stresses the effectiveness of conveying that the organization has high standards, coupled with expressing confidence that the person indeed can be successful here.

Supporting:  “giving people the know-how to manage the challenges and the opportunities in the setting and, as much as possible, related challenges in their lives.”

Churn recounts case study after case study establishing how the right messages and support delivered at the outset of the relationship can set the stage for growing trust and decreasing churn. For supporting those new to an organization, Steele offers additional guidance:

• Help should be less about getting outcomes and more about supplying the know-how needed to achieve those outcomes.
• Make help available to everyone, to avoid stigma.
• Let helping through providing how-to-dos yield progress that then builds confidence.
• Focus people at first on small, manageable goals that will lead to larger achievements.
• An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of remediation – detect problems early and respond with support in real-time.

Steele also addresses how corrosive it is to such trust when one takes an “identity-blind” posture, such as “we don’t see [race, color, gender, etc.].”  Regardless of intent, such professed identity blindness “unfortunately implies that one can overlook even profound parts of another person – experiences tied to their group identity – and still convincingly see them for who they are.”  Instead of reducing churn and building trust, the claim of identity blindness only raises troubling questions:

To Steele, the better approach is “wiseness.” “Wiseness sees full humanity in human difference.  It sees human differences as the way equal humanity manifests itself differently under different life conditions.”

None of this is easy. But Steele’s reframing takes an age-old, intractable problem – ingrained implicit biases and resulting stereotype threats – and gives us clarity on something specific we can affirmatively do, from the outset, to foster both diversity and Belonging. We can focus on building trust across differences, to minimize churn.