Читать книгу Everyday Bias - Howard J. Ross - Страница 10

I’m entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they’re thinking and who they are and who’s hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what’s the story, really? —Alice Walker

Imagine you are walking down the street one morning, perhaps going to work. You walk past any number of people. And even though you are mostly lost in thought, certain people get your attention. The guy in the blue suit with the umbrella looks angry. The woman with the wire-rimmed glasses looks friendly. This person looks wealthy, another one poor. This person looks intelligent, that one, you’re not so sure. Or perhaps you walk into a party alone. Who do you walk up to talk to, and why?

Check it out yourself the next time you are in a group of people. How long does it take before you start evaluating, judging, and classifying them as happy, sad, smart, dumb, attractive, unattractive, safe, dangerous? Do you make a quick judgment about their job? And how thoughtful are you when making these judgments? Our minds are filled with memories, conscious and unconscious, that we access to figure out the circumstances we find ourselves in.

In fact, this sort of thinking doesn’t apply only to people, but to virtually anything we encounter. Stop for a moment and take a look around the room or place you are sitting in right now. Allow your eyes to focus on any inanimate object and see what memory comes up. Does the lamp remind you of one that was at your grandmother’s house when you were growing up? Does the fire alarm remind you of fire drills in school? Does a picture on the wall remind you of one that was in a college dorm room? When was the last time you thought about any of those things? As it is, these memories are stored in our unconscious. We are not thinking about them at all until something, or someone, jogs them into consciousness.

And there is something else to notice. What feelings do these memories bring up? Are they pleasant, happy, or warm ones? Or are they sad, upsetting, or even traumatic? Seeing those objects recalls both the memory and the feelings associated with those objects.

Over the course of our lives, we collect millions of memories, which get stored in both the conscious and unconscious parts of our brains. Some of them are pretty obvious and dependable, but most drift into an amalgamation of thoughts and feelings that are recessed in a sort of filing system in our brains. Circumstances we encounter can trigger those memories, often in ways that we’re not aware of in full. These memories also get stitched together into a fabric that makes up our view of the “real” world. But how “real” is this world?

When I was young, we used to have “sock hops” after our junior high school basketball games. And in those days, we really did dance in socks so we wouldn’t mess up the gym floor! Given that there were virtually no LGBTQ students who were “out,” the boys would invariably line up on one side of the room and the girls on the other. It was almost always expected that the boys would ask the girls to dance, and so at some point you were expected to walk all the way across the gym floor, in front of all of your friends, and ask a girl to dance. If she said no, you had to walk all the way back, again, in front of all of your friends.

And on the whole walk back, what were you thinking? More often than not, it was something like “I’ll never do that again!”

Flash forward twenty-five years. You are working for a company that is having an annual conference. You are asked to call an important community member to invite them to the event. You sit down at your desk and pick up the phone, and all of a sudden you feel a wave of nervousness sweep through you. The act of invitation has triggered a fear of rejection. It is almost like somebody entered your internal jukebox, hit “D7,” and that song of fear began to play. Did you choose to feel a fear of rejection at that moment? Or did the fear of rejection simply “happen”? Could it have been that the name of the woman you were calling reminded you somehow of the name of the girl who rejected you at the dance, or any of a hundred similar connections?

These kinds of triggers are around us all of the time. A memory may be triggered and we cannot say why it was triggered. I’m sure almost everybody reading this has had an incident when you were walking somewhere, driving a car or doing almost anything, and “out of nowhere” you start thinking about something you haven’t thought about in a long time. Without our realizing it, something has jogged that memory. It might have been something that passed in our peripheral vision, or a smell or sound or bump in the road. Memories are constantly being triggered within us.

Here is one example of a seemingly “random” memory trigger. I was working out at the gym one morning and listening to my iPod. My iPod has more than 24,000 songs on it and sometimes I just put it on “shuffle” and songs will play at random. I might hear a song that I haven’t heard in a few years. That was exactly what happened on this particular morning. A Neil Young song that I like came on; in fact I even played it a second time. I listened to eight or nine more songs and then showered and dressed and got in my car. At the stop light, I had a thought about a health food store that was a couple of miles down the road that my wife and I used to go to but that I hadn’t been to in a good while. I decided to drive that way, not even remembering the store’s name. When I pulled into the parking lot, I saw the store, which is named “Harvest Moon.” Which happens to be the same name as the Neil Young song I played twice! Coincidence? Perhaps, but I don’t think so.

This is the way our minds work. Different things get linked together, along with all of the memories and feelings associated with those things. When we meet somebody and say, “There’s something about that person that I like,” that person is probably stimulating an old memory of somebody or something that was positive. If that memory link is to a negative stereotype that we have been exposed to in our past, the same applies.

Over the course of the past couple of decades, we have experienced an explosion in new research about the way our minds and brains work. The ability to use technology in new ways has permitted us to not only to watch the brain in action in a more robust fashion than ever before, but also has allowed many more brains to be tested. This has helped us begin to understand the way we think in a much more acute way. And what we are seeing is anything but “logical.”

As a diversity and human resources/management professional, my interest in this research is completely practical. How can we take what we have learned from the mind and use it to better understand our relationships and organizations, so that we can make more conscious decisions? What actually changes our behavior? One thing that feeds our predisposition to act unconsciously is our tendency to rush ahead before we truly understand what we are dealing with at that moment.

I like to use dieting as an example of behavior that is not always so well thought out because it is such an obvious one that applies to so many people. For years I struggled with my weight, fluctuating between gaining and losing as much as forty pounds. Even when I was heavy, I knew exactly what to do: eat less and exercise more. With the possible exception of a few people, that formula is pretty dependable. It wasn’t until I looked behind the curtain, so to speak, that I began to understand why I eat (in my case, eating is related to stress and fatigue), that I actually had a chance to stick with a sensible weight loss regimen.

To deal with an issue, we have to know what we are dealing with in the first place. So, let’s talk about the real issues we deal with on a daily basis.

We have known for a long time that the world we see is shaped by our experience. In the simplest of terms, two people wander up to a snake. One says, “Cool! A snake!” The other immediately says (or feels), “Oh my God! I’m going to die!” The snake is no different, but each person’s experience with the snake is obviously very different. And the background through which they see the snake shapes those experiences.

Throughout our lives, we are exposed to countless experiences, numerous teachings, and also certain paradigms that we have been told are “true.” All of this makes up an ideological structure, a kind of internal “book of rules” through which we process the world we see. That book of rules can then both consciously and unconsciously influence our behavior, and in turn, what we experience. We develop a certain schema, which is a system through which we organize and perceive things that we encounter.

We all have schema. I am a musician, having sung and played in a Rock and Roll band for more than thirty years. My wife is a fantastic watercolorist. We may be listening to a new song and she is thinking “great song!”, while I’m listening to how the instruments play off each other, or the way the voices harmonize. Then we go to an art gallery, and she looks at a painting and begins to describe “the shadowing that they’re using, and the way they combine the colors and use splatter effects . . . and so on” while I look and say, “Pretty picture!”

Think of something similar that applies to you. Do you have a hobby or something you are particularly fascinated with or that you enjoy doing? Haven’t you noticed how easily you spot things related to that when they occur around you?

Let me show you what I mean. Take a look at the picture on the following page (figure 2.1). It was designed many years ago by Karl Dallenbach, one of the early pioneers of experimental psychology and the editor of the American Journal of Psychology for more than half of a century. See if you can make out a discernible image.

Perhaps you saw something you recognize in the picture? Or maybe you did not. Now turn the page and look at the next image with the picture drawn in a way that is easier to see (figure 2.2).

Can you see the cow? Now go back and look at the original picture. It is almost impossible to not see the cow, isn’t it? Something that was invisible just minutes ago is now inescapably in your line of vision.

This experience is often referred to as perceptual organization, the ability of the mind to organize information around a common unifying idea. Once you have been shown that the cow is indeed there (by looking at the other picture), you can’t not see it! Our brains are designed to organize around particular ideas, concepts, or variables that are important to, or known by us.

The same is true at work. Our professional skills focus our attention in similar ways. I remember a number of years ago I had a visit from my wife’s brother, who has a very successful house painting business. I was telling him we were thinking of painting one of the rooms in the house and asked him a simple question. His response involved many more questions, questions I would never have thought to ask. What kind of paint? What kind of roller? To which I responded, “A paint roller!” Then there was the matter of how long to let the paint dry. How many coats? On and on. Knowing what questions to ask is often what actually gives us mastery. And that same body of distinctions can frame what we see or miss, and in doing so, can dramatically affect the nature of the way we see the world.

The more critical we perceive something to be part of our survival, the more we will automatically refer back to the instinctive ways of seeing that we have learned. My friend and colleague John Cruzat spent twenty years in the military, with most of those years spent in hostile environments. He can’t help but scan rooftops, even as he walks down a perfectly safe street, because his war experience trained him to do that, even though it makes no real sense in the situation and environment he is in at present.

Still, when we are looking at those things that help shape our experiences and perceptions, what things are we not seeing?

If the job that we have can so easily shape our perception, how can the most fundamental identities that we live with throughout our lives, including our race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and so on, not do as much?

In real time, being able to make quick determinations about the people we encounter and the situations we are in is critical to our survival. It is built into the fundamental ways our brains function. Social identification is especially important because picking up social clues about the circumstances we are in not only helps us be successful, but more importantly, it keeps us safe.

However, in real life, what we think we see may not be clearly happening at all. Our perceptions, our memories and our social judgments are all constructed by our unconscious mind from the limited information that we interpret through the expectations we have, the context that we see the situation in, and what we hope to get out of the situation.

So, what really takes place in our minds when we observe a person or situation?

Often, our first mental reaction comes from the amygdala, the most primitive part of the brain, and, when looking at matters from an evolutionary standpoint, the oldest part. There are two amygdalae in a normal human brain, each located within the temporal lobes. The amygdalae are a key part of our limbic system, which is a complex set of structures in the brain that control various important functions including emotion, long-term memory, and behavior. The amygdalae play a primary role in processing our emotional reactions, and they also are involved in beginning the process of linking those emotional reactions to memories.

Quite logically, the amygdala is especially sensitive to fear. I often like to think of the amygdala as a deer in the forest. If you have ever observed a deer in the wild, you notice that it is constantly scanning, highly sensitive to potential danger, and ready to respond accordingly. The amygdala has evolved in similar ways. As I noted earlier, from a survival standpoint alone, it makes sense for the amygdala to spot danger before pleasure. If something pleasurable is coming your way and you don’t notice it, it is a nice surprise. Certainly no major harm is done. But if something dangerous is approaching and you don’t notice it, you could end up dead! Something of that sort has a tendency to heighten the senses, doesn’t it? The amygdala scans what we are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or sensing with a particular sensitivity to circumstances or people that might be threatening. Some of these might be obvious to us, but overwhelmingly, they may be things that our conscious mind does not even perceive.

We are exposed to as many as eleven million sensory triggers at any one time, yet we can only absorb about forty to fifty. We consciously notice a much smaller number than that, perhaps as few as seven. Given the immense number of stimuli we are exposed to at any one particular moment, how can we really know what we are responding to?

As the amygdala picks up these signals, it sends them to the hippocampus, the center of long term memory in the brain, as if running to the filing cabinet to see if you can find something that you know you have stored somewhere in there. The memory guides our reaction, in a conscious or unconscious, and positive or negative way. That triggers the anterior cingulate cortex. The anterior cingulate cortex is responsible for a tremendous amount of our rapid, responsive, and automatic functioning. This amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex response is fundamental to the functioning of the limbic system. It keeps us walking, talking, breathing, along with hundreds of other “automatic” responses that would almost paralyze us if we had to think about them each time we encountered a new environmental stimuli. It is like a raging river of automaticity that helps us function on a minute-by-minute basis throughout our lives. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman called this System One thinking. It is very instinctive, very fast, and often strongly driven by visceral, emotional responses.

This automatic response rapidly kicks our brain into reaction to whatever the amygdala senses. These almost instantaneous reactions are often drawn from past memories, and they provide us with the ability to respond and react quickly when necessary. For example, if somebody throws something at you, it is not the best time to stop and say, “Hmmm. What is the best thing for me to do in a situation like this?” If you do, the object could hit you. Instead, the anterior cingulate cortex sends a message to our nervous system that causes us to react to the potential threat and our hands fly up to protect ourselves, or we duck or dodge the object. Most people can probably remember the game of “flinch” that many of us played as children, in which one person would place their hands under another’s and then either try to slap the other person’s hands or pretend to do so. Remember how hard it was to stop the automatic impulse to pull one’s hands away?

Our reaction to what we see is also strongly affected by the context in which we see it. Let me give you an example. Read the characters in figure 2.3:

Now read the characters in figure 2.4 on the next page.

So, is the middle character a “B” or a “13”? Context determines whether it is a letter or a number. In fact, context determines almost everything we see.

Where bias is concerned, we usually see people in the context of the ideas we have developed about “those kinds of people.” One of the responses in this cycle that is especially central to our propensity toward bias is our natural human tendency to sort people into “them” and “us” categories. This tendency has been documented for many years as the source of some of our most intense conflicts, whether it is in interpersonal relationships based on identity (gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.), or within countries (the North and the South in the American Civil War, Hutu versus Tutsi in Rwanda, Catholic versus Protestant in Northern Ireland, etc.), by politics (Democrat versus Republican), by sports (Yankees/Red Sox or Michigan/Ohio State), and in countless other ways.

Our identities can easily become defined by our relationship with “the other,” and our sensitivity to the feeling of “otherness” can change, depending upon the context we find ourselves in. An African American female attorney, working in a large law firm, may at one moment see herself as one of the lawyers when an issue arrives between the lawyers and the administrative staff, but then just as quickly react from her gender and racial identity when the dispute is between a white male lawyer and a black female executive assistant. We all have multiple identities through which we see the world at various different times, in various different ways.

Allyson Robinson, American Human Rights Activist

I encounter bias on an almost daily basis. To the degree that people around me are aware that I am transgender, I am judged to be mentally unstable, morally corrupt, or just plain “weird.” This becomes the primary, predominant lens through which some relate to me. Most people rely on negative stereotypes, misunderstandings, and misinformation. Gender dysphoria, the condition from which most transgender people suffer, is still poorly understood by the public despite the fact that physicians have been treating it successfully for over a century.

These biases lead to shockingly high rates of unemployment and poverty among transgender people in America, twice the rate of unemployment as our fellow citizens. Yet we are almost twice as likely to hold a bachelor’s degree. This means that hiring managers are uncritically ruling out highly qualified transgender candidates—and their businesses pay the price of that bias.

Even among those who are well intentioned, unconscious bias expresses itself. When someone who never knew me as a male slips and uses a male pronoun to describe me, that pronoun opens a window into his or her thinking about me. Conversely, when someone to whom I’ve just disclosed my transgender status responds with, “I never would have known if you hadn’t told me,” he may feel as if he’s paying me a compliment. In reality, they’re telling me they expect people like me to fall short of their standard for womanhood or manhood.

As a general rule, we are more attentive to our identity and the feeling of otherness when we are in a nondominant group. It is worth noting, for instance, that the people who committed the acts on September 11, 2001, are generally referred to as “Arab” or “Muslim” terrorists. Yet Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the two U.S.-born, white, Christian men who were convicted of the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City, are rarely referred to as “white male” or “Christian” terrorists.

This phenomenon can even affect our own perception of our identity. Depending upon the circumstance we are in, our group identity may be more or less present to us. Let me describe a personal example.

My wife and business partner, Leslie, and I were asked to conduct a half-day workshop for an annual gathering of a group of Muslim leaders from the United States and the United Kingdom. The group’s mission statement says it is “dedicated to promoting social integration and mobility.” The group of nearly one hundred people included a member of the British Parliament, a top official from Al Jazeera, imams, academics and business leaders, and many other people representing various professions.

There is nothing unusual about my being asked to lead a half-day workshop on unconscious bias; after all, it’s what I do for a living. It’s why I am writing this book. I’ve conducted thousands of workshops during my career, but in the days approaching this particular workshop I noticed there was something different going on in my internal conversation about this one.

What bugged me was that I couldn’t stop being concerned about how they would react to the fact that I am Jewish.

Now, I’ve been Jewish since the day I was born, and I have definitely been Jewish since I began my career. And I can’t remember ever before having it be something I was consciously thinking about when going into a workshop. The circumstances, the context shifted my perception. I ended up sharing this very insight with the group and the session ended up going well.

This tendency to determine quickly “us” and “them” is foundational to our survival, as I have discussed earlier. Knowing whether “they” are one of “us” keeps us safe. We, quite logically, are likely to be more positively disposed toward people who we feel safer around, and more negatively disposed to those we don’t. However, those we identify with as “us” or who we see as “them” may be subject to very fluid interpretations because all of us have any number of different identities. I am a man, I am Jewish, I am white, I am of a certain generational group, and so on. My friend Dan Egol, who is of mixed race, describes such fluid interpretation this way:

For people who are of mixed race or multiracial/ethnic, that can complicate the way we experience otherness. Our physical representation may not coincide with how we identify and how people view us may not match how we identify. We may not have an “other” or everyone may be the other, depending on the situation. For example, when I am walking around Columbia Heights—a predominantly Latinx^[1]/African American neighborhood in Washington, D.C., I “pass” as white and know physically how I come across since I am light-skinned. People who don’t know me can mistake me for a white person based on my appearance, but I prefer to be in Columbia Heights because the Spanish language and culture is very comforting to me. There is a disconnect between how I relate to the space and how people see me as a racial outsider. The “us/them” paradigm gets complicated because my physical traits betray my cultural connection to the community. While I see myself as similar to the majority community, I doubt I am ever seen that way by that same majority community.

Regardless of what situation we are in, the tendency toward the “us versus them” way of seeing the world is strong within us. In fact, researchers have discovered that this tendency begins early in life.

Neha Mahajan, a psychologist at Temple University, and Karen Wynn, professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and director of Yale’s infant cognition laboratory, have studied the development of this “us/them” phenomena in relation to young children.^[2] Mahajan and Wynn chose thirty-two babies, all of them just under one year of age. The researchers gave the babies a choice between three foods, Cheerios in one bowl, or graham crackers or green beans in another. They noted which snack each baby preferred.

The babies were then shown two researcher-controlled puppets that were given the same food choices the babies had been given and were simulated to appear as if they were making a choice between the foods. Finally, when the infants were given a choice between the two puppets, twenty-seven of the thirty-two babies chose the puppets that had made choices similar to what the babies had picked. Even at this early age, we have developed the capacity to identify “us.” In fact, in other studies, Wynn was able to see that children have a sense of a moral code, identifying “right” and “wrong” when they were as young as five months old. Other researchers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and China have demonstrated that babies demonstrate preference for people of their own race when they are as little as three months old!^[3] Wynn and her team conducted an even more remarkable second experiment. They took the puppets the babies had chosen and those that weren’t and play acted that each of them was treated either well or not by another set of puppets. The babies were then offered a choice between the second set of puppets. They chose the puppets that treated the one they had earlier associated with more positively, and also the ones that treated the ones that they had earlier rejected more harshly!

They were demonstrating bias against the “other” and they were not even a year old!

This is not to say we are born without the facility for empathy. On the contrary, we have the capacity to feel so closely aligned with people that we can almost feel their pain or sadness in our bodies. Most of us have had the instant reaction to seeing somebody have an accident, either in person or while watching a movie or television show. We can feel the reaction in our body, a visceral flinching as if we were feeling the pain ourselves.

We know that something similar happens when we see very young babies relate to their parents. There is a natural tendency for the babies to imitate parental behavior, to “mirror” the actions that they see. The Austrian Nobel Prize–winning zoologist Konrad Lorenz was one of the cofounders of the field of ethology, which is the biology of behavior. Lorenz was particularly interested in studying how animals began to develop their identities and their way of being “imprinted” to their parents upon birth. Lorenz famously showed this in various experiments. One of the best known involved Lorenz substituting himself for the parents of goslings upon their hatching. He found that they related to him as their parent throughout their lives.

But if connecting to “our people” is so important, how do we connect so deeply with others? The answer may lie in a discovery that occurred in Parma, Italy, in the late 1980s.

Five University of Parma neurophysiologists, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Giuseppe Di Pellegrino, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese, were observing a group of macaque monkeys to attempt to understand how certain neurons controlled hand and mouth movements. Food was placed close enough to the monkeys so that they could reach for it. Electrodes tracked the ventral premotor cortex of the monkeys’ brains so the scientists could observe how the brain responded when the monkey picked up the food. However, something unexpected changed the focus of the experiment.

One of the researchers casually reached into the bowl of peanuts that had been placed in front of the monkey and took one. Suddenly, and completely unexpectedly, the tracking system began to record signals from neurons that were identical to those it tracked when the monkeys were eating the peanuts themselves! The researchers named these “mirror neurons.” They were later identified in humans by a UCLA professor, Marco Iacoboni.^[4]

The discovery has been somewhat controversial in the twenty years since it was published, but many people have begun to see in it as a doorway to our understanding of human empathy. V. S. Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of San Diego, has become one of the strongest scientific advocates of the importance of this discovery to our understanding of empathy. He has called mirror neurons “the basis of civilization,” because they may explain why it is that we feel such a deep connection and both physical and emotional reaction to the experience of others, and in particular, pain. He also has suggested that an understanding of mirror neurons may provide a window into our understanding of human self-awareness.^[5]

Others have attributed this capacity to a phenomenon that has its roots in the philosophical debates of René Descartes and others and is called “theory of mind.” Theory of mind is the ability to attribute beliefs, intentions, wants, and knowledge to others, and to understand when others have beliefs that are the same or different from our own. While empathy and theory of mind are often used interchangeably, it is unclear whether these are exactly equivalent because theory of mind seems to be more of a function of the brain’s temporal lobe and the prefrontal cortex, and empathy relies more on the sensorimotor cortices as well as the limbic system. Nonetheless, both speak to the ability to sense the feelings, needs, and circumstances of others. It appears that most people have some capacity for theory of mind and, interestingly, women seem to have a stronger capacity for it, on the whole, than men.

Still, there are other times when we may feel so distant from that experienced by people, even those to whom we are the closest. It seems that our brains may be selective in their ability to be empathetic, depending upon whether we see another person as “them” or “us.” Xiaojing Xu, Xiangyu Zuo, Xiaoying Wang, and Shihui Han, researchers in psychology and radiology at Peking University, found that the empathetic neural responses in the anterior cingulate cortex decreased significantly when participants viewed faces of other races.^[6]

Mina Cikara, assistant professor of social and decision sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, Emile Bruneau, a postdoctoral fellow with the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Rebecca Saxe, associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT, have written that “these tendencies to care about and help one another form the foundation of human society. When the target is an out-group member, however, people may have powerful motivations not to care about or help ‘the other.’” They went on to say that “out-group member suffering elicits dampened empathetic responses as compared to in-group members’ suffering.” They even suggested that when faced with out-group suffering, people may feel schadenfreude, or pleasure gained from another’s pain.^[7]