Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

207 Pages·2014·1.26 MB·English

by  Howard J. Ross

Everyday Bias
Everyday Bias
Identifying and Navigating Unconscious
Judgments in Our Daily Lives
Howard J. Ross
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
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Copyright © 2014 by Rowman & Littlefield
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
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without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ross, Howard J.
Everyday Bias : Identifying and navigating unconscious judgments in our daily lives / by Howard J.
Ross.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-3083-5 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4422-3084-2 (electronic)
1. Prejudices. I. Title.
BF575.P9R67 2014
303.3'85--dc23
2014011226
TM
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Blinded by the Light of Our Bias xi
1 If You Are Human, You Are Biased 1
2 Thinking about Thinking 17
3 The Many Faces of Bias 41
4 Life, Death, and Unconscious Bias on a Rainy Night 59
5 Who Has the Power? 71
6 Like Water for the Fish: Networks of Bias in Everyday Life 85
7 Shifting to Neutral: HowWe Can Learn to Disengage from Bias 101
8 Incubators of Consciousness: Creating More Conscious
Organizations 121
Conclusion: A Brave NewWorld, A Grand New Journey 139
Appendix 145
Bibliography 161
Notes 169
Index 179
About the Author 183
v
Acknowledgments
When I began my professional career, I never set out to develop any exper-
tise in the specific topics discussed in this book. My interest in social justice
and my experience in social action almost inadvertently drew me to becom-
ing a consultant. My fascination with the topic of the unconscious mind
evolved over a number of years as I became more and more curious about
why it was that I would continually interact with seemingly good people who
would, nonetheless, demonstrate irrational behavior that created disparities in
the way they treated people and ran organizations. Convincing people to
develop an intention to be more equitable was challenging, but in the bigger
picture never seemed all that difficult. What I found perplexing was why
their behavior didn’t change over a sustainable period.
In a way, my life has forced me to grow and evolve. The pain that my
family suffered at the hands of Nazi aggression combined with growing up in
a barely desegregated Washington, D.C., community contributed to creating
a core sense of purpose to address injustice in society. The coincidence of
being born when I was and growing up during a time of tremendous social
upheaval placed me at the heart of the social change movement. My clumsi-
ness in my early leadership roles forced me to study leadership. Early in my
career my ignorance about how to grow a school that I was running led me to
learn about organizational and cultural change. My own transition through
personal struggles, particularly divorce, led me to learn more about myself
and how people experience their world. The exploration of my spiritual life
led me to explore the meaning of life. And my observations of my own biases
completely confounded me, because I knew that I didn’t want to be biased—
yet I was, and am!
vii
viii Acknowledgments
So I find myself an almost “accidental” specialist in the work that I have
had the privilege to be part of for the past thirty years. In that sense I have
many people to thank.
And so my work has taken me to forty-seven states and dozens of other
countries. I've worked with people in the back rooms of grocery stores and in
the board rooms of corporations; in hospital operating rooms and baseball
locker rooms. I've worked in every kind of organization you can imagine,
with people of every race, ethnicity, identity, age, and religion.
For my passion for equity and inclusion I am grateful to so many people
whom I have learned from and worked with. My experience in diversity and
inclusion has been influenced by hundreds of diversity professionals over the
years, far too many to name here, and also by the students and staff of
Operation Understanding DC, my students at Bennett College for Women,
colleagues at the Human Rights Campaign, Leadership Greater Washington,
the National Council for Community and Justice, and dozens of other social
change organizations that I have had the privilege of working with over the
years.
What I have learned about the brain and the mind has been influenced by
so many great minds over time that it is hard to count them all. Some of those
whose work has most enlightened me include: Robert F. Allen, Nalini Amba-
dy, Dan Ariely, Ian Ayres, Mahzarin Banaji, Lera Boroditsky, Christopher
Chabris, Amy Cuddy, Antonio Damasio, Edward De Bono, Joe Dispenza,
Michael Gazzaniga, Anthony Greenwald, Jonathan Haidt, John Jost, Carl
Jung, Daniel Kahneman, Ray Kurzweil, Jonah Lehrer, Matthew Lieberman,
Konrad Lorenz, Beau Lotto, Arnold Meyersburg, Leonard Mlodinow, Walter
Mischel, Michael Norton, Brian Nosek, Scott E. Page, Daniel Pink, Stephen
Pinker, V. S. Ramachandran, David Rock, Dan Siegel, Daniel Simon, Sam
Sommers, Claude Steele, Hal Stone, Sidra Stone, Amos Tversky, Shankar
Vedantam, Kipling Williams, TimWilson, and Philip Zimbardo.
My personal and spiritual growth led me to a fascination with the perenni-
al streams of learning, and I owe an enormous debt to the wisdom of the
Baghavad Gita, the ancient Sufis, particularly the poets Rumi and Hafiz, and
the teachings of the Buddha, who somehow seemed to identify patterns of the
mind 2,500 years ago that science is just now coming to understand. Also a
wide range of teachers, including Gerald Jampolsky, Fernando Flores, Buck-
minster Fuller, Neem Karoli Baba, Werner Erhardt, Howard Thurman, Nan-
cy Neall, Osho, Eckhardt Tolle, Ken Wilber, and Thich Nhat Hahn. And a
special thanks goes to my dear colleagues, friends and soul mates Michael
Schiesser and Neelama Eyres.
All of that provided the ingredients, but turning it into a book is another
story. I want to especially thank my editor Mary Stanik who not only worked
on basic editing, but also strategized the format with me and managed to
capture my “voice” in a way that gave me great confidence and trust, both