Good Life Project - Jessica Nordell | How to Reveal & Change Our Hidden Scripts

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

Have you ever realized how often you think without really thinking? Jessica is an award-winning author and science writer known for expertly blending rigorous science with compassionate humanity. With degrees in physics from Harvard and poetry from the University of Wisconsin, Jessica is deeply engaged with connecting across differences to expand and heal the human experience, and her debut book, The End Of Bias: A Beginning, is the culmination of fifteen years of reporting and writing on bias and discrimination and how to solve it. The book, which offers readers hope and direction on how to change their biased behavior, was named a Best Book of the Year by the World Economic Forum, Greater Good, AARP, and INC, and in our conversation today, we dive deeper into some of the fascinating ideas and research presented in her book. Jessica and I go back in time, and she walks me through some key moments in her life and career that led to her research into these hidden scripts and preferences, what they are, where they come from, how they affect us and offers ideas on how we can realistically examine and change the way we think about and treat others to create more meaningful and compassionate connections with the people around us. You can find Jessica at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Zoe Chance about how social dynamics and language influence our decisions.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount CodesPeloton: Get up to $200 off accessories like cycling shoes, heart rate monitors, and more when you purchase a Peloton Bike, Bike+ or Tread and up to $100 off accessories with the purchase of a Peloton Guide to take your workout to the next level. Get this offer before it ends on December 25th. Visit onepeloton.com All Access Membership separate. Offer ends December 25. Cannot be combined with other offers. See additional terms at onepeloton.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We all grow up in a culture that teaches us categories that are important in that culture, categories of people, social identities, different groups, what categories matter. When we encounter a person and we recognize the category or categories they belong to, all of that stored information starts to come to the forefront and it starts to influence the way that we interact with that person. And I think the other important thing about unconscious bias, in addition to the fact that it happens really automatically and spontaneously sometimes, is that it can really conflict with who we believe ourselves to be. We can believe ourselves to be a person who treats others well. In fact, most people do. I think most

people believe we treat others well. We want to be fair. We want to treat people in an egalitarian way. But then these stored memories and associations and stereotypes can really interfere with that and cause us to behave in ways that conflict with those values. So have you ever realized how often you think without really thinking? Well, according to the University of Virginia psych professor and author Timothy Wilson, we're faced with around 11 million pieces of info at any given moment. And out of that 11 million, funny thing is we're only actually able to process about 40 bits of information. So the result, well, rather than assessing all the information presented to

us, our brain compresses all that information and relies instead on our experiences, our beliefs, the patterns that we have, hidden scripts, and history to fill in the gaps, which most often leads to snap judgments or decisions. And over time, as we continue to use this imperfect data to navigate the world, unconscious biases, preferences begin to form. Things we're not even aware of, but are guiding how we interact with people and often judge them all day long without even realizing it's happening. And according to my guest today, Jessica Nordell, if left unchecked, they can and already have wreaked havoc on our cultures,

our organizations, our relationships, and communities. So Jessica is an award-winning author and science writer known for expertly blending rigorous science with compassionate humanity with degrees in physics from Harvard and poetry from the University of Wisconsin. She is deeply engaged with connecting across differences to really expand and heal the human experience. And her debut book, The End of Bias, A Beginning, it's the culmination of 15 years of reporting and writing on bias and discrimination and how to solve it. The book, which offers readers hope and direction on how to change their bias behavior, was named a best book of the year by the World

Economic Forum, Greater Good, ARP, and Inc. And in our conversation today, we dive deeper into some of the fascinating ideas and research presented in her book. Jessica and I also go back in time. She walks me through some of the key moments in her life and her career that led to her research into these hidden scripts and preferences. And we talk about what they are, where they come from, how they affect us, and offer ideas on how we can drastically re-examine and change the way we think about and treat others to create a more meaningful and compassionate connection with the people around us. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. I'm deeply fascinated by you, by the work that you've been doing, by the book. I just want to dive into some of these topics because obviously it's so of the moment,

not that it is anything new, but I'm so curious. I want to really deconstruct. So many different places that we could start in the conversation. I'm always curious just sort of like what brought a person to a particular place where they're doing the work they're doing, living the life that they're living. You spent a chunk of time writing in no small part in radio, Prairie Home Companion, working with Krista Tippett in the early days, and then end up bouncing back to school to study poetry. I'm always curious about the bigger decision also of somebody who goes out into the world is building a career, is building your chops, building like everything that, and then sort of takes this what from the outside looking in often appears to be like a hard left to do something where people are like, what's that about? I'm

curious if you're open to it, like sort of dropping back into that moment, because I'm always fascinated by those decision-making moments that often lead people in very different paths or directions. Absolutely. So I've taken many hard lefts in my life. So I just want to make sure I'm focusing on the one that you're asking. Were you wondering about the decision to go into poetry, to study poetry? Yeah. Yeah. Poetry has always been extremely important to me. And I feel like my doorway into poetry was accidentally happening across some excerpts from Adrienne Rich's book, Atlas of the Difficult World, which came out when I

was about 14. I think there's something special about age 13, 14. You're sort of just so open to the world. And I was lucky enough to intersect with her work at that age. And it just opened opened my heart, my mind. I just became fascinated with poetry as a way of using language to touch beyond the mind into the heart and into the spirit. I think of poetry almost as like a cathedral for language. It's this structure that invites us in and allows us to have like an experience that we could not have any other way. And that's what happened to me personally when I encountered Edrian Rich's poetry. And so poetry was really important to me as a reader, eventually as a writer. And in school, I actually studied physics. I was a science major, but always nurtured this love for language,

for writing. And at a certain point in my career as a journalist, I decided that I wanted to focus on it and went back to school and got a master's degree in creative writing, focusing on poetry. And I found it to be just an incredible lens to see the world, to approach everything. I mean, I work as a journalist now, and I feel like I draw on poetry all the time in my reading and my writing, in the way that I, you know, try to use language and put sentences together. So it continues to be a really important part of my life. So this is fascinating to me also, because when you think about journalism very often, you think about, okay, so the craft is generally, it's very often speed because you're on deadline constantly, right? And it's like, how can I get objective and focus on

the fact or as close to the like capital T truth as we can get, right? That's my job. It's less about the craft of the language actually gets the story out. It's like getting the story out as accurately as humanly possible. And then when you get to poetry, it's so much about the language itself. I have always been a big believer that the old quote, the medium is the message. You can't separate them. And you can see in your writing, even in your journalism, in the book length works, there's a rhythm, there's a cadence, there's a poetic aspect of what you do that just, it changes the way that the language lands. And I have to imagine that that's intentional for you. Like when you're writing a sentence or a paragraph or a page or a book, it's not just about,

is this accurate? Is this right? Is this valuable? But is the language doing what I hope it does? Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much. I really it does. Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. I agree that in journalism, the attention is not often to the language,

but for me, I completely agree the medium is the message. And I feel that maybe it's because of my background in poetry, I feel that if the language is right, if the word choice and the rhythm and the meter, even the meter, I think about the meter when I'm writing, like stressed and unstressed syllables, you know, if the meter is right for that particular idea, then I believe it can land in a way that creates an experience, an emotional experience, not just an intellectual experience. And yeah, when I'm writing, I often read the work, read the sentences out loud, change word order to try to get it just right. I'm thinking this conversation is making me think of something I heard the poet Franz Wright say once about poetry.

He's one of my favorite poets. And he said something like, I write poetry because it's something I can create that's small and perfect, and it fills me with ecstasy. I love that. That's fantastic. Yeah, I think it really is so much of a part of the way that something lands. It's interesting that you sort of, you speak out because I do the same thing when I write, you know, like I'm sort of, I'm literally like, I'm like, what does this sound like in my head

when I'm speaking it? And is there, and I'm feeling the rhythm and the pace and the cadence and all of these things and the tempo. And I feel like there's so little attention paid to that in a lot of popular writing, yet it can make such a profound difference in how it lands in somebody. It's those subtexts, it's those things we don't think about so often that actually allow something to bypass the analytical brain and just hit on an emotional level and get somebody to be like, oh, wow, I feel that. It's music. That's what poetry is. It's music. So it's a way of turning language into music and giving it the power that music has, which is like it bypasses our analytical brains and it creates, it lets us feel something.

Yeah, I love that. So you bring the poetry into the writing, you step back into the world of journalism, but there's an interesting sort of like, I don't know if you would call it an inciting incident, but that ties into the work that you've been really deepening into for years now. And it's, you have a story and you're pitching it around. Tell me what happens here. Yeah, this was early in my journalism career. I was pitching a story that had a particular link to something happening in the world. So it had like a narrow window where it would be interesting to editors. And I was sending it out. I didn't know anyone. I was cold querying people all over. And this was my first kind of first effort at pitching national magazines and newspapers. And I wasn't getting any response to these queries. So I had a moment of desperation, really, in which I decided to try pitching the same piece with a different name. And so instead of Jessica Nordell, which is my name, I pitched the same piece with a new email address and with the name JD Nordell, thinking

in the spirit of George Eliot and George Sand and so many women writers, maybe having a more masculine sounding name would be a benefit. I didn't really think it would work. It was sort of just like an idea. And the piece was accepted within a few hours, the same piece that hadn't gotten any attention before. That I think was an inciting moment for my interest in bias and discrimination. And, you know, my experiences as a woman in the world, in the working world, you know, continued to kind of reinforce that interest and that first experience. But that, I think, was the moment of like me thinking, hmm, also make the decision to say, okay, so actually I need to actually start writing under my own name. Tell me about that decision. When did you know it's time and why? I think there were a couple of things that happened. One was practically,

I couldn't keep track of the two bylines. And so I remember I had this really awkward experience where I pitched a piece as JD, I was interacting with this editor as JD. And I'll have to say that when I was JD, when I pitched with this man's name, I felt a kind of freedom in my way of interacting over email that I didn't experience as Jessica when I was pitching as Jessica. I felt like I could be more terse. I didn't have to use as many exclamation marks. I just kind of felt like this kind of power that I hadn't. So I enjoyed that. That was an interesting experience. But then I had this experience where I'd been corresponding with this editor. This editor thought my name was JD.

And then at one point they wanted to call me and talk about something on the phone. And I answered and said, hi, this is Jessica. And I could tell that they were really surprised and there was some awkwardness. And I just thought, I just don't want to keep doing this dance. And I think there was also a part of me that felt like I want there to be another woman's name out there in the world doing work that I felt was meaningful. So that was another part of the decision. Yeah. I'm interested also in the response or like when you're working with editors over a period of years, and then all of a sudden they realized, oh, this is same person, but I had probably made a whole bunch of assumptions about this person that weren't

right and probably communicated with them in a way that may have been different. What their response was, if any, or were they just caring about the work? It's a good question. I would love to ask them that question, actually, because I never addressed it head on. So I don't know if I have a really good answer for you. I mean, we definitely had some, there were some sort of awkward conversations like, oh, oh, okay. So are you Jessica? Are you JD? Like just which, which one is it? And then, you know, let's kind of move on. Yeah. This is, this is wasting my time. You know, back to your earlier point that journalism is about like getting things done on time. So we didn't really talk about it, but I felt like I noticed a difference in kind of the language that was used in emails and certainly the directness with which I felt free to communicate.

What was popping into my head when I was asking that also was I was around the earlier days of blogging, sort of like the mid 2000s. And there was a person who developed a really big following. There was a blogger with a clearly gendered name, like male, wrote with a lot of machismo. And then a couple of years into that, after developing a really huge following said, no, actually I'm not a male. I'm a woman. I'm a mom.

And there was huge blowback from her readers and people. It was certainly the very early days of being as bad as canceled as you could, you know, like in blog comments and stuff like that. And it was just, it was a fascinating, horrifying, just like the social phenomenon, like to sort of watch it all go down was just, it raised so many issues and questions in my mind. And not the least of which is why do you actually care that much if what you were being given on a weekly basis was actually valuable to you and moving you. But we do, you know, and this is sort of like layers and layers and layers deep, which leads us to really like the work that you've been diving into for a number of years now. You end up that, you know, like experience for you

really opens your curiosity as you shared about like this, the idea of bias and unconscious bias. I think a lot of times when we hear that, the immediate default for a lot of people is that this is about race and it's a yes and type of thing. Well, yes, but there's gender, there's mental health, there's body, there's faith, there's ability, there's like sexual preference. There's all these different things, right? What makes you sort of like reach a moment where you say, okay, I'm actually going to devote years of my life to research and create a substantial body of work around this question? You know, it was very personal for me. I felt like in different workplaces where I found my work was being perceived differently than an equivalent male colleague's work was being seen. I experienced

things that I learned later were really well-documented patterns for women in the workplace. Things like having my personality be kind of policed, being told that I was too aggressive or too abrasive when I was acting exactly in the same way as a male colleague, or maybe even a little bit more nurturing and communal than the male colleague, but was seen as being too assertive, too much. And so I was, you know, continuing to have these experiences. And so it sort of kept that journalistic interest really alive, you know, really lit up. It felt very urgent to me, very personal to me to understand this and ultimately to try to figure out what, if anything could be done about it.

Over the years, I continued to write pieces to try to understand this. I mean, another kind of turning point for me was talking to, well, first reading an essay published by the neurobiologist Ben Barris about his experience transitioning and presenting to the world as Ben after being a scientist presenting to the world as a woman and recognizing a lot of what he experienced. So your question was sort of like, what kept this as such an important topic for me over the years? So I would say, yeah, I think there were sort of key moments, reading the work by Ben Barris, understanding that this was what I was experiencing was part of a larger phenomenon, not being able to escape it in my own work life. And then ultimately, after writing many pieces about the phenomenon, becoming kind of impatient with just focusing on it as a problem,

just using kind of the standard journalistic lens where we expose wrongdoing and then we move on to the next problem. I really wanted to understand if there was something that could be done about it and what that could possibly be, which brought me to this particular book project. Yeah. watch getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes the apple watch series 10 available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generations iphone 10s are later required charge time and actual results will vary mayday mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman i knew you were gonna be fun on january 24th tell me how to fly this thing mark walberg you know what the difference between

me and you is you're gonna die don't shoot if we need them y'all need a pilot flight risk so when when we're talking about it let's just define this a little bit more actually unconscious bias implicit bias bias overt bias a lot of the focus really is on that you're talking about is this bias, which is less than conscious, however you want to language that. What are we actually talking about when we're talking about that? So we all grow up in a culture that teaches us categories that are important in that culture, categories of people, social identities, different groups, what categories matter. And as we're learning those categories, we start to learn associations and beliefs and stereotypes and cultural knowledge about those categories.

And so that all kind of lives in our memory. And then unconscious bias, or what I've come to think of as unexamined bias is what happens when we encounter a person who belongs to a category that we recognize. Like I'm encountering you right now and you belong to a bunch of different categories that I have in my memory. When we encounter a person and we recognize the category or categories they belong to, all of that stored information starts to come to the forefront and it starts to influence the way that we interact with that person or the way that we engage with that encounter. So this can happen

really quickly. I could not be even aware of all the ways that my stored associations and stereotypes and memories about your category are influencing how I feel about you, what I predict about you, how I predict about you, how I'm judging you, all of these things. And I think the other important thing about unconscious bias, in addition to the fact that it happens really automatically and spontaneously sometimes, is that it can really conflict with who we believe ourselves to be. We can believe ourselves to be a person who treats others well. In fact, most people do. I think most people believe we treat others well. We want to be fair.

We want to treat people in an egalitarian way. But then these stored memories and associations and stereotypes can really interfere with that and cause us to behave in ways that conflict with those values. And this is one of my questions. I think most of us consider ourselves, quote, good people. However you define moral or ethical and whatever tradition that matters to you, we'd like to see ourselves that way, right? So the notion that there might be a script or a series of scripts running that we are completely unaware of based on our history, based on our experience, based on what's been transmitted to us through family, through culture, through community. That we have no idea the scripts are running, but they're literally controlling our decisions and behaviors all day, every day.

And sometimes in ways that may veer from what we consider to be moral, good, ethical. I have trouble stomaching that, even though I know the science behind it. Absolutely. And I mean, that's what I was encountering in the workplace. I was working with these very well-intentioned men often who describe themselves as feminist and really believe and see themselves as wanting to help women in the workplace and help women generally. And yet they were totally unaware of the way that they were evaluating women and men differently and the way that they were in subtle ways devaluing women's work or overemphasizing personalities of women employees versus

male employees. And so, yeah, it's very hard, I think, for us often to see the way that these deeply inherited myths, I would call them, are influencing I'm sure any given person has so many stories and moments that they can point to in their own personalize. But there's also, I mean, there's a body of research around this that identifies particular types of experiences or domains where this is really prevalent. Share some of the research that... I'm curious what the research around some of these things are, but I'm also curious, were you surprised by any of this research, either by the fact that it existed or by the size of what you were seeing in any of it? There are so many examples of this research, either by the fact that it existed or by the size of what you were seeing in any of it? There are so many examples of this kind of phenomenon happening, and it's really ubiquitous. In almost every field, maybe every field of human endeavor, there is now research that demonstrates that groups are treated differently on the sole basis of their identity, their social identity.

So some examples, doctors are less likely to prescribe pain medication for Black and Latino patients than white patients who are expressing similar levels of distress. Teachers are more likely to doubt the academic ability of heavier students than slender students. Sports announcers, when they are commenting on a basketball player's performance, if that player has darker skin, the announcer is more likely to comment on their body. If they have lighter skin, the announcer is more likely to comment on their body. If they have lighter skin, the announcer is more likely to comment on their mind. Faculty are less likely to respond to an email from a prospective graduate student if that student's name sounds Latino, Chinese, Indian, Black, or female than if that student's name is Brad Anderson. And so we see in all of these different realms, and I haven't even touched on the enormous body of research about policing

and bias in policing. So there's just a massive amount of research. And to your question about whether it was surprising, as I, it's a really good question. I don't know if I was surprised, but in some cases, I was profoundly alarmed. I was saddened and angered by a lot of the research that I found, particularly in domains like healthcare, where bias can have life or death consequences. It did, in fact, for a friend of mine whose story I tell in the book, and it does for many people whose symptoms aren't taken seriously or whose diagnoses are delayed because of unexamined biases and forms of discrimination that they're experiencing. Yeah. I mean, I remember, I guess it was a year and a half, a couple of years ago now,

we had Michelle Harper. She wrote this incredible piece, book actually, The Beauty in Breaking, but she was an ER doc. And she very intentionally, she's a black woman ER doc, very intentionally chose hospitals that were under-resourced neighborhoods. And she wrote about what she saw happening in the ER and how the standard of care was just profoundly different based on assumed identity, based on what people saw, who they saw you and assumed you to be. And as an ER doc, she found that a huge amount of her time was spent not just in service of her patients,

but as an advocate for change. But even that alone was difficult because she's a woman, she's in medicine. So she herself is sort of like enduring her own multiple scripts that are running biased against her actually being able to center and share important information and have it taken seriously and respond to. So I think when you think about it in the office, you're like, okay, so these things, when you think about it in the healthcare domain, especially to me, that's where it's almost most horrifying because we're talking about people's lives here. And we're talking about healthcare providers who are ostensibly trying to help. They're trying to, you know, they went into the profession to hopefully, you know, to heal, to uplift, to help people get better.

And then we see all these really harmful patterns. Yeah. And many of whom, if you had asked them, are you treating people differently? Yes. They would honestly say, I would imagine you could hook them up to a polygraph. And actually they would say, no, I'm treating everyone the same. They would register as telling the truth on a polygraph or however you wanted to do it because you truly believe this is something you're not aware of. Yes. One of the most, there's so many examples from medicine and healthcare.

One of the bodies of research that really shook me had to do with racism in health care. And there's a meta-analysis of the experience of patients with vascular disease. And what this meta-analysis, so study of studies found was that Black patients with vascular disease, when compared to White patients with comparable vascular disease, are more likely to experience an amputation of a limb than a White patient is compared to a limb-sparing treatment. And this is even after you factor in things like the severity of the disease, the quality of the hospital, the insurance coverage, all of these things that you might say, oh, well, maybe it's that, you know, maybe there's some other reason.

When you take away all of those factors, you still see Black patients being subjected to this disfiguring treatment more than white patients. I think when we really sit with that reality, it forces us to see what's happening, which is that we are valuing certain groups over other groups. I mean, medicine is certainly a horrifying place to see this show up. And again, I want to keep zooming the lens out here and reminding myself, our listeners, that we're talking about people showing up, truly believing in the heart that we're doing the right thing. We're treating people equally and that we're ethical, good people. This is about what's happening underneath that we are not even aware is happening.

You see it in medicine. You see it in the workplace in all sorts of different ways, very often in hiring and promotion. You did this really fascinating experiment. You did a collaboration that looked at, okay, not just in a moment in time, but like what's potentially the cumulative impact of these unexamined biases in the workplace over a period of time. Talk me through what you put together because I thought it was fascinating. You know, one of the questions I had when I was doing this work was, okay, we have all of this research that looks at these snapshots in time of bias. We see bias at the moment in the workplace, the moment someone evaluates a resume, the moment someone

is filling out a performance evaluation. But I knew, you know, we all know that this doesn't just happen in these discrete moments. It happens over periods of time. It's this long-term accumulation of experiences that people have. And so my question was like, how does it all add up? If you took two identical people and you subjected one of them to frequent everyday, maybe, you know, small size, but frequent experiences of bias, and the other person didn't have that experience, what would be the different outcome? This was really my question. And I asked a lot of experts and researchers and scholars, and no one could really give me a good answer, like how all of these instances add up? So teamed up with a computer scientist to develop a computer simulation to try to answer

this question. And we focused on the workplace because there's so much research about all of the different ways that bias shows up in the workplace. And we looked at gender bias in particular. And so we built what's known as an agent-based model, which is kind of a technical term, but it's basically a computer simulation where you have these individual agents and you assign them specific behaviors and you make a bunch of rules up and then you kind of start the simulation and see what happens over time. It's a way to look at complex or emergent kind of systems.

And so we developed this simulation of a workplace we called NormCorp. And it's an eight-level workplace hierarchy with a lot of people at the bottom and a few people at the top. And in this workplace, we just had people do sort of simple tasks like complete projects, the project succeeded or failed. And then people were either, their scores were boosted or they were diminished depending on if their projects succeeded or failed. And then over time, we looked, then we promoted people based on who had the highest scores. So we developed this virtual workplace with all of these rules and we made it half women and half men. And then we introduced a handful of the really

common kinds of gender bias that women experience at work into the simulation. And we just introduced a very small amount, 3% difference. And so some of the patterns are things like women's work being slightly devalued compared to men's work, or women on mixed gender teams being given a little less credit for a project's success than men. They're a little more penalized for failure than men. These sorts of patterns were the patterns we introduced into the simulation. And then we ran it, and we found that after 20 promotion cycles, the top level of the company was 87% men. And this was after introducing only a 3% difference, only a 3% bias in the way women were evaluated. And so I think what it showed was that these small amounts, if they're applied frequently enough, if they're experienced frequently enough,

can have a huge impact on the kind of disparities that we see in the real world. Because somebody might want to write them off. Well, it's just like, it's a little thing here and there. It's a little thing here and there, but like what you're showing is like, but over time, you know, even at a very slow, and you could have, I'm sure easily set that at like 10%, you know, and had it probably be like closer to reality and had a 95% male-dominated top level through promotions. It adds up over a period of months and years. I think a lot of us focus on what is the emotional and wellbeing effect on people when you're struggling with this, when you're on the other side of these decisions and actions. And it can be fairly brutalizing, right?

But it also has very practical real world implications because if you work in an organization for 10 years and you're doing the equivalent value of somebody else who, because of these very minor biases repeated over and over, over time, and your likelihood of actually rising up, being able to have more security, more income, more opportunity, more stability is greatly diminished. These are practical implications that go beyond sort of like individual emotional state or psychological wellbeing. I mean, it's factored into it.

And it's stunning, you know, when you think about that. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. One of the things, I think it's clear from your writing, from the research,

from this really interesting collaboration that you did, that a lot of people are harmed from being on the other side of these unexamined biases. But one of my curiosities also is how are we harmed? Like as you and I have this conversation, we are running our own scripts, right? Every single person, we have these unexamined biases and they affect other people in the world, sometimes negatively. But we've got to be affected by them. Like How are they diminishing or harming our humanity by having these scripts run that we're not even aware of being run? In so many ways, Jonathan. I think one of the risks of having these kinds of conversations is that we do, I think we can fall into talking about it as though this is like a one-way experience and that if you and I are in a

relationship and I'm expressing bias toward you, that harms you, which it obviously does, but I'm only benefiting from this imbalance and that it's only to your benefit that I would be trying to do something about this. And I think that's really risky because it obscures what's really going on, which is that if I am looking at you through this hallucination of bias, this distorting lens, I can't really see you, and I can't really perceive reality, and I can't really perceive reality and I can't really love you because I can't see you clearly. And if you see me through that same kind of haze, then you can't understand me and I can't trust you. And so this starts to make a trusting relationship really hard, if not impossible, because we're not seeing each other.

We're not actually perceiving what's really happening with each other. And so one thing that I came to understand that I didn't understand at the beginning of this project was that this is important for me also. Of course, it's important because we want more justice in the world and we want people to be treated well. And this is creating real consequences in terms of people's livelihoods and lives and health and ability to just do their jobs in many cases. But if I don't take seriously the way that it hurts me also, then I can fall into this kind of savioristic mindset that impedes a lot of the work that we try to do in the world. And it's also just not capturing the full reality of what's happening.

I mean, that lands really true to me. I feel like we move through the world in no small way, yearning to know and be known by others. And that is a huge amount of what allows us to breathe, to be okay in our lives. And when we're running these scripts, it obscures that, it distracts it, it puts noise in the system, but we're not even aware of it. And when you look at the data on loneliness over the last 15, 20 years, and the levels of it have come up dramatically in the last couple of years have exacerbated that. And you wonder like how much of his technology, how much of all the yada yada that we're talking about, but how much of it is actually a layering,

a polarization that is actually deepening and layering into scripts that we all had, but actually like exacerbating them so that we know ourselves less well. And then we are not allowing ourselves to know others either. And we have no idea that this is happening, you know? So yes, it causes harm to others, but also, you know, it stops us from a fundamental need to just be human and to know and be known, not for some facade or some set of assumptions or

representations, but for who we really are. When that quality of attention is present, when we drop into seeing someone for who they are, the effect is so profound. I mean, I can tell you I had a personal experience of this many years ago. I actually had the chance to meet Adrienne Rich in person after being this kind of crazed fan for a long time. And I went to a reading that she gave, and I waited in a long line to have her sign a book. She was very old at this point. And this was probably 20 years ago. And I got to the front of the line and I gave her my book. And she just looked at me and listened to me. I think I was probably babbling something about how much I loved her work and how much it had meant to me. And she listened to me with this quality of attention. I don't know if I have

experienced outside of that. I felt like I was being seen truly. And I felt like physically moved by the experience. And it's kind of like something I think back to when I think about what's the goal? What are we trying to do here? I think about that experience and how it affected me and how it made me feel like you're mentioning actually seen, actually heard, and how meaningful that was. Yeah. I mean, what you're describing also is really, it's a somatic experience, right? It's not just intellectually, oh, I feel seen. I realize there's something that's embodied there, which brings up another curiosity of mine around this whole topic, which is, I don't know if this is the right way to ask the question, which is, where does

unexamined bias live in us? Because I think the first impulse is to say, well, it lives in the brain. It's this thing where your brain is running these scripts underneath based on a certain set of assumptions in history. But I think about a conversation I had with Bessel Wendel a couple of years back about trauma. And the newer lens on trauma is you can't just treat it through talk therapy or through dealing with the mind. It is once that script has been running for a certain window of time, it is deeply embodied. It is somatic and you have to actually unwind the body in order to unwind the script of trauma and the impact of trauma. I'm curious whether you have any kind of similar lens on that in the context of unexamined bias. Hmm. What it makes me think of is some of the approaches that I explored that look at how to decrease bias. Because some of the approaches that I found have an effect on this in a positive way that cause us to make less of a snap judgment toward another person or to do less stereotyping, our mind-body approaches. So for instance, one of the things that exacerbates bias that makes us more likely to stereotype are things like stress, fatigue, exhaustion,

cognitive load, time pressure. When we practice things like mindfulness, meditation, and we start to decrease some of those impairments, we're less likely to make snap judgments. We're less likely to do stereotyping. One of the really interesting pieces of research I uncovered had to do with loving-kindness meditation and the way that loving-kindness meditation allows people to act more altruistically. This is research by the psychologist Helen Wang, who found that when people engaged in loving kindness, compassion meditation, they behaved more altruistically toward others in an unrelated activity later. And there's also some research, and this is very early research, but I'll mention it because I think it's fascinating. There was a study that recruited people who were very experienced loving kindness meditators,

and it looked at their brain responses after being shown images of themselves and images of others. And compared to a control group, the meditators' brains over one region responded more similarly to the two pictures. In other words, it seemed like over one part of their brain, at least, they differentiated less between self and other. And so there's this suggestion that maybe one thing that loving kindness meditation does is it starts to dissolve maybe some of that boundary between self and other. And if there's less of a boundary between you and me, it's harder for me

to discriminate against you, right? Harder for me to stereotype you as someone who's different than me. Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. It speaks to the phenomenon that you actually speak about. I think it's pronounced homopoly, right? Yes. Homophily. Yeah. Homophily, right? Where we have a love of same, you know, and that this isn't a bias that so many of us have. We don't realize that we're gravitating towards or inviting in people who are like, share a lot of physical, similar, psychological, cultural traits as us. And if that meditation can actually make others almost like present as more of same, then it allows us to sort of like, okay, so I love them as I love myself, assuming you love yourself. Yes. That's a good, that's a good caveat. Right. So fascinating. So, so mindfulness

meditation is a really interesting intervention. You mentioned loving kindness, mindfulness you mentioned also. And that's interesting to me on two levels. One is a lot of people look at mindfulness as a way to be more aware of what's actually happening in front of you rather than constantly living in the past or future. It keeps bringing you back to the present moment and seeing more clearly the reality of what's going on. And that can be on the surface and also subtext, right? But the other thing that mindfulness does, and this, I guess, maybe goes back to my curiosity

about the somatic experience is it drops you into your body. So many of us walk around sort of like living from the head up and mindfulness is this powerful practice that says, no, there's actually something else happening there. You have a sensing feeling system that is giving you feedback. Those two things, increasing awareness and having like a clearer sense of what's actually happening in the moment and a clearer sense of how your physical body is responding to that. It's got to be really powerful in terms of saying, huh, what's making me feel this way that I maybe

wasn't even aware of? So you can start to identify what the scripts might be. Yes. And it starts to, I think about, I think the analogy that I use in the book is like, we have this perception, taken sensory information, we have a reaction, we have a feeling, and it's all bound up really tightly, like a bundle of twigs that are all held together with a really tight strap. And mindfulness seems to loosen the strap a little. So you can start, there's some space then between what's coming in and my reaction. It allows me to maybe notice what's happening in my body, what's happening in front of me, drop into the present moment.

And then I can actually take a look around and see what's going on, you know, rather than kind of moving on autopilot. And it's incredibly powerful. I mean, I certainly, I have had the experience of coming out of, you know, a period of meditation. I can think of a meditation retreat I was on once where I noticed that after a few days of really doing this practice, I related to people totally differently. I would see someone and just feel nothing but curiosity about them. All of the predictions, expectations, evaluations, judgments that I didn't even realize were running as scripts constantly beforehand, kind of fell away. And it was like, replaced by curiosity and lack of these other scripts. So yeah, I think it's a really powerful intervention in trying to work away some of these biases.

I mean, especially right because, and we're getting into sort of like the what do we do about this part of the conversation. But what occurs to me is that you almost have like two problems, right? One is you're not aware of the fact that these things are running in the first place. And then the second is like, once you become aware, what are the effective things that you can do to change this? And this was sort of like the big question that you were asking going into the research project that became the book. But there's that first level again, you know, like nothing happens. Like you can't change something that you're not aware of. So like this is a tool, mindfulness practice is like one tool to increase awareness. And then the question becomes, what do we do about that? Like, are these changeable? And if so, like what are the big levers that might help get us there? You know, when I first went into this project, I thought that what I was going to try to find

were approaches that actually change the associations we hold in our minds. And what I learned was that those associations are hard to shift. They're sort of, psychologists call it paradoxically flexible. You can kind of shift someone's implicit association after a brief intervention, but it kind of snaps back into place afterwards. So what I started to look at more was approaches that change people's behavior. And there are a lot of approaches that have been found to change people's behavior and maybe even change those associations a little bit or those instinctive reactions. There are some trainings that have been found to change people's behavior by using sort

of a cognitive behavior approach, increasing people's awareness of their capacity to be biased, increasing their motivation by communicating the consequences, and then giving them strategies to try replacement strategies. One of those strategies that I found really, really persuasive when looking at the research is forming meaningful collaborative relationships with people who are different than we are. This came out of some research from the 1950s by a psychologist named Gordon Alport. He really tried to systematically look at prejudice, and he wondered whether there might be certain ways of structuring human interactions that could maybe start to wear away some stereotypes. And what he proposed, he didn't prove it at the time, but he proposed that

maybe if people could come together who were different of some social difference at equal status and collaborate on a shared goal, then maybe that could start to wear away stereotypes and start to shift how they interacted with one another. And what I found in my digging through the scholarship on this is that there are a lot of examples of that actually happening. When the US Army integrated toward the end of World War II, white officers' attitudes, feelings, behaviors toward Black compatriots radically changed as a result of that side-by-side work. There was a recent study, really interesting study in India that looked at cricket players who were of different castes. And this was an experiment that was done that put some men of different casts on the same team and some men only on teams with men of the same cast. And they found that the men who were on teams with men of

different casts later were more likely to have friends of different casts, were more likely to want to nominate someone from a different cast for a reward, for a prize. It really started to change the way they interacted. So forming meaningful relationships across differences with this collaborative angle seems to be a really powerful tool that I think could be used a lot more in our own lives. I mean, socially, collectively, communally, also in work situations, it situations be really interesting, you know, to factor that into how you form projects, teams, collaborations, conversations, instead of what is so often the typical, let's have some sort of training that we bring in from the outside in.

Yes. That as you write about, actually do more harm than good. Yes. You know, and actually create more of a boomerang reaction. It can actually deepen the bias in, you know, not infrequently. As you're sharing this really, the notion of working side by side, shoulder by shoulder, it's sort of like on a collective project with people who are different than you and letting that be the thing that kind of without being the intention of let's do this project so that we can try and remove bias. No, let's just do this thing. And if you're seeing each other's like, what are the 36 questions? But Aaron's original research was in his lab on intimacy, where he took 45 minutes to complete

strangers in a university, brought them together and had them go through these 36 questions that were progressively more vulnerable and required more revealing of who they were. And often at the end, people said they felt closer to this other person who was a stranger than they did to friends that they'd had for years. And I wonder about intentional interventions like that, that are fairly short and sweet, but just create the safe container and the set of appropriate prompts that allow you to see another person's humanity. What would stuff like that do if it happened on a more regular basis outside of a lab? I think it would be fascinating. I think one of the things that

these kinds of interactions does is it restructures the kind of categories we have in our minds for one another. One of the things that happens along with homophily, like love of the same, where we're kind of drawn to people who remind us of ourselves, is this tendency to lump people of a different group into one kind of monolith. Technical term is outgroup homogeneity. And it just means if we don't belong to a group, we tend to see everyone in that group as being kind of similar, sharing certain traits, having some kind of essential qualities that are similar. What happens when we have these kinds of interactions is that monolithic way of seeing another group starts to fracture, and we start to see all of these different categories that exist in this large category. And that's really important because when we start to see that this group of other, what we think of as the other, is actually just as diverse and complex and made up of so many different kinds of people as our own group, then it becomes a lot harder to stereotype that group. It's just not based in reality. There are too many different kinds of

people to be able to use a broad brush stereotype. I love your thought experiment. I mean, if we could – I remember hearing about libraries. Did you ever hear about this approach? There was a library somewhere that introduced this program where you could check out a person. Oh, no kidding. Instead of a book. I never heard of this. And the idea was there were all of these different kinds of people at the library,

and you could, quote unquote, check out a person, sit down with them. I think maybe the term check out is not quite the right term. It has a little different connotation. But the idea is you could sit down with this person and ask them questions. And I think maybe there were even question prompts to create some kind of intimate conversation. I don't know if it was ever studied formally in terms of the impact, but I think that we can't really overstate the power of those kinds of relationships in breaking down these inherited bad ideas. Yeah. And imagine if what you just described at a library was, you know, happened at every

school library. Like when kids were in, you know, like primary school or middle school, when they're forming so many of these, you know, these scripts are just starting to get encoded into you. Like if you could actually like change the data set that was going into them. And I think if we zoom the lens out, you know, we are all going to run scripts. We are all going to categorize. Our brains literally have to do that because it actually helps them function. But I think what we're really talking about is

how do we do that in a way which is expansive and inclusive and betters our lives and the lives of the world around us rather than excludes and isolates and worsens the world around us. So it's less about saying, let's eliminate all of these things. I would imagine, at least from the way that I'm thinking about it, that's not really possible. But can we rewire them in a way where the net effect of that is actually we all rise together? Does that make sense to you? Or do you think they actually can be removed? I think given where we are at this moment in history, given the hundreds of years of inherited ideas that we have in terms of race and

racial hierarchies, of inherited lies about race and racial hierarchies, and the thousands of years of inherited ideas we have about gender hierarchies. If these things can be eliminated, I think it will take a very long time. But I think that we do have the capacity to really examine these inherited ideas, really question where they're coming from and whether they're serving us as a society, as individuals, as communities, as friends, and be deliberate about working against them in all these different ways. That I think I have come to believe is definitely possible. I've seen the effect in my own life, my own relationships, and in other people's lives and other communities. And so I think we can move toward what we're trying to get to. Certainly behind that.

And it feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? I think to live a good life is to move towards seeing others in their full humanity and full complexity, and in turn being seen in our own full humanity and full complexity. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, say that you will also love the conversation we had with Zoe Chance about how social dynamics and language influence our behaviors. You'll find a link to Zoe's episode in the show notes.

Good Life Project is a part of the ACAST Creator Network. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those, you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we

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