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Making people aware of their implicit biases doesn’t usually change minds. But here’s what does work
Link information
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- Authors
- Betsy Mason, Knowable Magazine
- Published
- Jun 10 2020
- Word count
- 2428 words
I don't love the headline that PBS News Hour chose for this. Not only is it very clickbaity, but it doesn't even deliver on the bait! In fact, it delivers the opposite. After listing the many strategies that don't effectively change people's minds, the interviewee concludes with a pretty direct statement that, well, they genuinely don't know what works:
The interview goes on to discuss discretion elimination, but that is a method that can mitigate outcomes caused by implicit bias but says nothing of the changing of the biases of the minds themselves, as set up in the title. I'm not saying this to nitpick but am instead highlighting that a rather optimistic title is used to mask a pretty pessimistic point: implicit bias is relatively rigid, resistant to many common-sense attempts to change it, and doesn't have a known counter at present (at least according to this one article -- I'm not well versed enough to speak to the topic at large).
Sounds like you were fine with the title, you just didn't like the rest of it :)
Here is what I got out of the article...
Take the test to determine your biases
Prime yourself by placing photos of positive role models around your house to counter your negative bias
I had tried to guess what the proposed solution was, but since the article doesn't actually answer it's own question (as noted by @kfwyre) I'll share my guess here.
Immersion. It works for straight up racism, why not for implicit bias? If you take someone who has a bias against a certain culture or race, and get them to live in it for awhile, they're going to absorb things both consciously and unconsciously. It's not magic, the person had to put in deliberate effort, but it can work. Foremost it normalizes the "other" by exposure so the little tribalist instincts accept a wider range of people as "in". Then further, people begin to form personal bonds and then "in" moves to "us".