Psychol. Instead, she heard gasps, the loudest after she described an experiment that showed how quickly people link black faces … 618 Okonofua, Eberhardt Typically, stereotyping researchers conduct cross-sec- tional, laboratory studies that require participants to offer a judgment about a given target who is … . A foundational building block to mitigate implicit bias is to raise awareness of its existence. Opens in new window. University of Michigan 4. Looking back, Eberhardt says the subject of race first fascinated her when she was growing up as the youngest of five children in a predominantly African-American, working-class area of Cleveland called Lee-Harvard. I really don't know how she pulled it off.". Eberhardt’s argument is very simple: in order to combat racism, we must confront our hidden racial biases. The old racist trope had seemingly died out, a small sign of progress, but the experiments suggested the connection was still robust. That realization led her to shift more of her energies from delineating the problem to finding solutions. After ending the awkward discussion, she turned to the reading of the week on unconscious racism, which reignited discussion, with students decrying such behavior. Are performance evaluation systems evaluated for gender neutrality?”, These same questions can be adjusted to account for racial and cultural differences that naturally occur in organizations due to things such as affinity bias, which is the tendency for people to hire, promote, and develop people that look, talk, and possess similar experiences. There were better facilities, better teachers and real expectations. Much of Eberhardt's work has focused on revealing the wide-ranging consequences of those biases. There needs to be an emphasis on reforming cultural and institutional environments that promote bias—for example, by fixing policies that create racial discrepancies in hiring or incarceration. View Jennifer Ristoff’s profile on LinkedIn, the world's largest professional community. (He would go off to a private school for middle and high school; the two later remet at Harvard. In one study capturing how high the stakes are, Eberhardt and her colleagues analyzed two decades' worth of capital murder cases in Philadelphia involving white victims and black defendants—44 cases in all. @2021 Stanford University "He didn't know why he said it. Levine also states, “If you make a decision feeling hungry, angry, lonely, or tired (or God-forbid some combination of more than one of the above) emotion wins 100 percent of the time and will likely push you in the wrong direction.”. When Eberhardt was in seventh grade, for example, soon after the move, her teacher asked the class to share their families' immigration stories. "This is someone who is really out in the trenches working with police departments and the criminal justice system.". For example, a stranger snaps at you for bumping into him at a supermarket—the initial reaction may be to label him a jerk, when in fact his response may be the result of poor sleep, a recent death of a loved one or severe stress at work. Figueroa is eager for the results of one of Eberhardt's most ambitious projects. Preparing yourself and others to overcome these hidden biases is a difficult proposition, but one that must be addressed if you value organizational culture. She attends staff meetings, gives feedback, tracks data and provides training. Eberhardt's message is not an easy one to hear, particularly for the many Americans who think racial discrimination is largely a thing of the past, or that they themselves would never treat someone differently because of race, or that racism is somewhere else. . The talent evaluators mitigated their unconscious biases even further by asking musicians to remove their shoes before walking onto the stage behind the curtain because the process could be influenced by the sounds of heels walking across the stage. "I think we're going to find in the next few years that the standard will become that officers start learning about implicit bias when they are recruits," says Magnus, the Richmond police chief. One such example emerged from orchestras. "Bias can grow organically out of that," she says. Humility is an important component to mitigate implicit bias. Her new home was a bike ride and a world away from her old neighborhood, a move enabled by her father, a mailman with an eighth-grade education who ran a successful side business in antiques and Tiffany glass. Another important step in mitigating implicit bias inside an organization is through teaching your colleagues about the different biases that exist. Inasmuch as the organizational leaders set the tone for the organizational culture, acceptance and buy-in from these individuals is paramount. Eberhardt's academic study of race began more than two decades ago during graduate school at Harvard, where she initially focused on cognitive psychology, a discipline pertaining to how people acquire, process and store information. 25, 2017). Or, are you more likely to go with your gut? "All over this country, black people are still finding themselves in situations where they feel the state does not fully protect them, where they feel the state does not fully register their pain," she said. But the reach of implicit bias, arising from America's tortured racial history, from culture and from still pervasive inequities, is powerful, enduring and underrecognized, especially in the context of criminal justice. Jennifer L. Eberhardt et al., Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing, 87 J. If you were to look at the hiring or learning and development selection processes, do you have a system where certain information about the candidates is hidden from the evaluators so as not to allow implicit biases to influence the decision-making process? Jennifer Eberhardt A social psychologist at Stanford University, Jennifer Eberhardt investigates the consequences of the psychological association between race and crime. Still, Eberhardt says focusing only on individual instances of racism, on getting rid of the "bad people," won't solve the problem. Reimagining workplace learning during COVID-19. Physical Address: 875 Line Street Moscow, Idaho. When Eberhardt asked the students to discuss the unexpected result, silence fell over the normally chatty class. Eberhardt has been heavily involved with the Oakland Police Department—to the point that she's almost embedded, says Assistant Police Chief Paul Figueroa. Yet she was certain the vast majority of officers would sincerely recoil at the idea of policing with prejudice. Slowing people down is a good thing. JENNIFER EBERHARDT: Well, I mean, I think—when we’ve done studies, we’ve asked people to rate faces, say, on how stereotypically black they … It seeps into everything, a point Eberhardt sometimes uses personal anecdote to reinforce. Eberhardt shows us how we can be vulnerable to bias but not doomed to live under its grip. "But no one connected these studies to what had happened at the beginning of the class period," Eberhardt later wrote in her dissertation. There are a number of systems inside an organization where implicit bias is allowed to fester because the steps required to make the system fairer and more impartial have not been taken. If you ever have a chance of overcoming these hidden biases and muting their effects, you have to be aware that most of your decisions are made with System 1 automatic thinking. More than a decade later, Eberhardt is no longer the anonymous academic she was then. "People would choose their friends based on how smart they were," she says. She and her colleagues are analyzing footage of thousands of encounters recorded with officers' body cameras in an attempt to parse the behaviors that lead to positive outcomes from those that spiral into problems. He credits Eberhardt for pushing for the change. It's not that the respondents were necessarily bigots or even bad people, Eberhardt says. For learning leaders, this can affect people throughout an organization. But that didn't happen this day. I wasn't going to make a difference from litigation or from protesting," she says. T he first time Jennifer Eberhardt presented her research at a law enforcement conference, she braced for a cold shoulder. In addition, proactive steps can be taken to implement policies and procedures that can remove or minimize systemic processes that inadvertently or inherently are affected by implicit bias. Self-awareness and accountability are crucial in overcoming implicit bias in the workplace. “We must also recognize that the old adage, ‘trust your gut,’ may not prevent us from recognizing implicit bias,” writes Karen Steinhauser in “Everything is a Little Bit Biased.” “We must focus on how we form opinions about people. "No matter what we controlled for, the black defendants appeared to be punished in proportion to the blackness of their features," she said. Ohio State University 5. Jennifer Eberhardt, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, suggests slowing down your thinking processes as a method to mitigate implicit bias: “There are lots of things we have at our disposal to manage the potential for bias, and one of … PART 1: Understanding implicit bias and its detriment to organizations, crucial in overcoming implicit bias in the workplace, women made up approximately 10 percent of the total members in the country’s top orchestras, a controversial internal memo written by an employee at Google, evaluate candidates based on a list of requirements, 5 ways to improve remote performance evaluations, Meet the CLO Advisory Board: Tamar Elkeles, Chief Learning Officer’s most-watched webinars of 2020, Text-based learning: emerging from the pandemic as a must-have, Getting 2021 Right – Harvard Psychologist on Building Productivity & Wellbeing, Creating Your Micro-credentialing Strategy, Learning Driven Growth at Schneider Electric, Building the LG Electronics Leadership Bench: High Potential Development to Drive High Performance. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. Research Report Looking Deathworthy Perceived Stereotypicality of Black Defendants Predicts Capital-Sentencing Outcomes Jennifer L. Eberhardt,1 Paul G. Davies,2 Valerie J. Purdie-Vaughns,3 and Sheri Lynn Johnson4 1Department of Psychology, Stanford University; 2Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles; 3Department of Psychology, Yale University; … By engaging in consequential reflection, learning leaders can engage System 2, more deliberate thinking, and consider not only the direct impact of the decision to be made, but also the ripples that will affect the careers of those who are passed over. Twitter - share an article. This paper presents a systematic analysis of officer body-worn camera footage, using computational linguistic techniques to automatically measure the … ), At Beachwood, by comparison, college seemed inevitable. "She was looking for a way to show elegantly the real consequences for people, [and] to show it in a way that would wake people up to the fact that, when you're the target of these stereotypes, it can be harmful, if not life-threatening," Markus says. That awareness enables incremental change. Stanford social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt. She has also contributed to research on unconscious bias, including demonstrating how racial imagery a… “The best we can do is a compromise: learn to recognize situations in which mistakes are likely and try harder to avoid significant mistakes when the stakes are higher.” Following this path will require you and your colleagues to understand the role of emotions as they relate to implicit bias and System 1 thinking. . Racial bias against African-Americans isn't confined to the past or the South or police or even whites. From the beginning of her career at Stanford in 1998 (which she began as a non-tenure-track professor), the now-tenured Eberhardt has coupled scholarship with a drive to bring her research into the world, typically through novel collaborations with officials in the criminal justice system. "She . This is the third and final article in a series exploring implicit bias by CLO contributor Michael Bret Hood. For instance, the findings about implicit race bias indicate that individuals will perceive as more ... decision-procedure in order to avoid potential biases - or new ways of checking each other’s decisions and holding each other accountable. Framing problems from the perspective of others can assist in generating questions that could uncover implicit biases as well as systemically unfair policies and procedures that limit opportunities for others. “The human brain is a wonderful gift, but with success and tenure we are fooled into certainty and drawn away from humility,” writes Forbes contributor Michael Brainard. Inasmuch as the word “bias” suggests a negative connotation, efforts to raise awareness can be difficult since people do not like to think of themselves as “flawed.” Yet if your colleagues are aware that implicit bias exists and are aware of how it can significantly impact their decision-making, they can be better prepared to mitigate the impact. According to Michael Levine of Psychology Today, rationality only represents about 20 percent of human decision-making. Eliminating bias in your workplace systems. As much as you may not want to acknowledge it, you are not as rational as you believe yourself to be. "Stuff like that just didn't happen in my old neighborhood.". Jennifer Eberhardt, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, suggests slowing down your thinking processes as a method to mitigate implicit bias: “There are lots of things we have at our disposal to manage the potential for bias, and one of those things is just slowing down. "I wouldn't be doing this but for Jennifer Eberhardt.". Social Psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt is investigating the subtle, complex, largely unconscious yet deeply ingrained ways that individuals racially code and categorize people and the far-reaching consequences of stereotypic associations between race and crime. She sensed that law enforcement had a problem with racial profiling. Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt (born 1965) is an African-American social psychologist who is currently a professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. Some of your best talent could leave if their concerns are not systematically addressed. Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford. In another study in 2012, commuters at a Bay Area train station were shown informational slides about the California prison system and then asked if they'd sign a petition in support of a proposed (and ultimately successful) amendment to lessen the severity of the state's Three Strikes law, which gives mandatory life sentences to certain repeat offenders. "Somehow she got us all together, and she got these major city chiefs and sheriffs to show up with an open mind," says Jack Glaser, a social psychologist at UC-Berkeley. Scientists like Goff say that's not the case. Penguin. Yet her signature remains the same: unsettling research revealing the long, pernicious reach of unconscious racial bias, and an unrelenting commitment to share her findings with the outside world. Learning leaders should also understand that self-awareness, as it relates to implicit bias, is more than consciously thinking about which biases might lead to flawed decision-making. "This is not someone who is just doing work in the ivory tower of a university," says Chris Magnus, chief of police in Richmond, Calif., a Bay Area city where a quarter of the population is black. The other kids seemed to think she was joking. "People need to have hope," she says. But 45 percent of prisoners serving a life sentence under the Three Strikes law then were black. Another method to offset biases involves matching job requirements and development opportunities with candidates’ knowledge, skills, and abilities. Facebook - share an article. Eberhardt guesses she might never have even gone to college if they'd stayed in Lee-Harvard. When musicians started auditioning behind a curtain, the fact that evaluators could no longer see who was playing neutralized any potential for gender bias. by a team of Stanford University social psychologists led by Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt. Lorie Fridell, then head of research for a law enforcement policy group in Washington, D.C., says Eberhardt's research helped her resolve a nagging paradox. It is said that emotions drive 80 percent of the choices Americans make, while practicality and objectivity only represent about 20 percent of decision-making.” Certain conditions can also lead to an increased reliance on System 1 thinking, which is where your biases reside. In one experiment, subjects were subliminally shown black or white faces, then asked to identify a blurry image as it came into focus over 41 frames. . Acknowledgments: First off, thanks to Josh Cavalier for the reviews and advice, and to Linda Bump Harrison, Jennifer Eberhardt, and everyone else at New Riders for the opportunity to work on such a wonderful book. The reach of implicit bias, arising from America’s tortured racial history, from culture and from still pervasive inequities, is powerful, enduring and underrecognized. And yet he had connected blackness and crime and his father, the parent he was probably closer to at the time. Regardless of which method you choose, chances are you have made some bad decisions in your life. Eberhardt was bemused. The defendants' photographs were independently rated according to how stereotypically black they appeared. "I always knew I wasn't going to be the person who made a difference because I had the loudest voice. Lost to history for 100 years, Stanford’s first African-American student found a new champion, and an old debate was finally laid to rest. Her son grew up in one of the most educated areas in the country, watched little TV and hardly seemed to notice race. By taking your time and deploying System 2 to generate new perspectives, practice consequential reflection, learn more about implicit biases, and fundamentally accept that you are flawed, you, as a learning leader, can create a more diverse organization and culture where people are allowed to thrive even when we look, behave, and act differently than others. As student after student told stories of their families leaving European countries, including tales of fleeing the Holocaust, Eberhardt's mind raced. When employees are cognizant of the situations where implicit biases are most likely to be a significant factor in decision-making, awareness can potentially mitigate the nefarious effects. ", While other scientists have also made major advances in implicit bias research, it is Eberhardt who brought the science to police, says Fridell, who now heads her own business, which has trained law enforcement officers across the United States and Canada to recognize and mitigate their biases. Her work raising awareness at the department about implicit bias has contributed to changes that include a new policy for foot pursuits. "For the first time in history, we'll be able to see firsthand how police officers make contact with the public and how those interactions unfold in real time," Eberhardt says. But with images of weapons, the difference was stark—subjects who had unknowingly seen black faces needed far fewer frames to identify a gun or a knife than those who had been shown white faces. Racial bias is a problem that we all have a role to play in solving. Eberhardt's radiant smile and easy laugh can make it seem she somehow rides above the implications of her findings. Rather than follow a suspect into a backyard, Figueroa says, officers are now supposed to wait for backup, reducing the chances of a high-adrenaline confrontation in which biases can surface unchecked. But she does see signs of progress, from new policies to new training to a greater attention and openness to the problem. Search 30,000 expert sources with subject matter expertise in seconds. The disparities were blatant—her father and brothers were frequently pulled over by police—and subtle. What Are Learning Organizations, and What Do They Really Do? The recent protests and tumult in response to police killings, she said, are part of the cost of not seeing—the price of our blindness to bias. "Because the worlds were so different, I just thought about race a lot and I thought about inequality a lot," she says. has worked with police departments across the country to help them recognize implicit bias and understand racial disparities in policing. The constant “questioning our own thinking would be impossibly tedious, and System 2 is much too slow and inefficient to serve as a substitute for System 1 in making routine decisions,” writes psychologist Daniel Kahnemann. Police officers speak significantly less respectfully to black than to white community members in everyday traffic stops, even after controlling for officer race, infraction severity, stop location, and stop outcome. Eight years ago or so, she was flying back to California from Harvard, where her husband was teaching winter term, when the middle of their three sons pointed out a man he said looked like his dad. 9.