Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 410: Ways to End Bias That Will Also Make You Happier | Jessica Nordell

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

Jessica Nordell is a science and culture journalist who has written for the Atlantic and the New York Times. She earned a B.A. in physics from Harvard and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her new book is called The End of Bias, A Beginning: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias. This episode explores: why humans evolved to have biases; what happens physiologically when biases are challenged; why some of the most popular personal and institutional strategies for confronting biases do not work; the role mindfulness and loving kindness meditation can play in reducing bias; and the power of studying history.This episode is part one of a weeklong series the TPH podcast is doing about bias. Part two features Bob Wright, author of Why Buddhism is True, who has done some interesting work to challenge his own tribal instincts.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/jessica-nordell-410See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, everybody. We all, of course, know that bias can lead to massive problems in our culture. But we might think that prejudice and tribalism are problems for other people to solve. That assumption came back to bite my guests today when she embarked upon a journalistic investigation of what causes humans to be biased

and how we can deal with it. Shandita seeing that she had some humbling blind spots and assumptions of her own. Jessica Nordell is a science and culture journalist who has written for the Atlantic and the New York times among other publications. She was educated at MIT and Harvard. Her new book is called The End of Bias of Beginning, the science and practice of overcoming

unconscious bias. I love this interview. She's fascinating. We talked about why we humans evolved to have biases, what happens in our bodies when somebody challenges our biases? Why some of the most popular personal and institutional strategies for confronting bias don't work? The role, mindfulness and loving kindness meditation can play in reducing bias and the surprising to me at least power of studying history in this regard.

I should say this is actually part one of a week-long series we're doing on bias on Wednesday. We have Robert Wright, author of the fantastic book Why Buddhism is True, who has done some pretty fascinating work to challenge his own tribal instincts. We'll get started with Jessica Nordele right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do?

What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com.

All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. and memes come from. And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ Jessica Nordell, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. Why and how did you get into this immense and immensely important subject of bias? You know, I think that I had been always kind of aware

of being a woman and aware that my being a woman in the world was affecting the way that people were interacting with me, but it was sort of like kind of a background hum. It wasn't really something that I thought about a lot or really intensely. I think that the sort of turning point for me was when I was starting out as a journalist and I had been working for a number of regional and local publications and publishing in Minnesota and wanting to make the next step and publish in more national publications.

So I started pitching to national publications and not hearing anything back and not having any luck. And then I had this one particular experience, which was trying to pitch a particular story that had like a particular sort of window of time that it would have been relevant. And I sent the story out, no response, and kind of in a moment of desperation, I decided to send the same pitch out under a man's name. And so I chose JD as my alias, made a new email address, new email inbox, sent out the same pitch, and the piece was accepted within a couple hours. So I was shocked, actually.

I really didn't expect that it was going to work, like a charm. And I think that's what sort of clicked my interest in bias into place. I started getting much more interested in researching kind of the psychology of it. I don't think that that editor necessarily had an overt, well considered belief that pitches from women shouldn't be considered as seriously as pitches from men. But nonetheless, that's what happened. And so I got much more interested in the topic, really from my own experience, and it just grew from there.

You're writing about the psychology of bias is fascinating. You talk about it as whenever two people meet, it's like these two edges, like two ecosystems, meaning one another, and that's where bias comes into play. Yeah, I mean, I think really anytime two people come together, there's the opportunity for bias to emerge. I mean, even you and me speaking right now, we're engaging with each other.

We have this video platform, so we can see each other, and we're bringing to this encounter untold numbers of expectations, ideas, associations, stereotypes that can influence the way that we're interacting. And I think one thing that's really important to think about with bias is that this isn't just me projecting my biases onto you as a passive recipient or you projecting your biases

onto me as a passive recipient. It's really an interaction. So the way I treat you affects your response to me, which in turn affects my response to you and it becomes this kind of dynamic, complex interaction that can have really, really extreme consequences. And we're not actually in that case when it goes truly pear-shaped.

We're not responding to one another as human beings. We're actually responding to the culture's story about the group, whatever group is operational in the moment, to which we belong. Yes, I started thinking of it as responding like more to a daydream or a hallucination than an actual person because the culture has so many messages and so many false ideas, some true ideas, a lot of false ideas about different groups of people and it's all in play, I think, during that interaction. In the book, you describe stereotyping as, on the one hand, a normal human activity,

a normal activity of the human mind, but also a kind of addiction. What do you mean by that? Yeah, so this is really interesting. There's a media scholar named Travis Dixon who says, over time, stereotyping can become almost an addiction. And I think what's meant by that is that when we stereotype another person, like if I'm stereotyping you, what I'm really doing is predicting something about you, I'm predicting what you're going to say or do, how you're going to respond to me, how you're going to be in the world,

and it's an expectation. So when our brains expect something or predict something, they do something very specific with what happens. So if our predictions are right, we have sort of a feeling of reward. It feels good. And if our predictions are wrong, it can be kind of unpleasant or jarring. Like there's some really interesting research by Wendy Berrymenda is the psychologist who found that when people interact

with someone who violates a stereotype, they respond as though they're experiencing cardiovascular threat, like it's jarring to have our expectations violated and it's rewarding to have them confirmed. So when we have an expectation and it's correct and we get a reward, that feels good. And when it happens intermittently, that's called intermittent reward, like an intermittent reward cycle. And that becomes really addictive. So that's why our phones are addictive, right?

Because we're checking social media, we're checking our inbox, and sometimes we get a ping, and sometimes we don't. And that's an extremely addictive cycle. So yeah, there are some researchers who suggest that, and this is actually research that I think is, is under review right now, that stereotyping is actually, it fits into this intermittent reward cycle, which is like an extremely hard cycle to break. and reward cycle, which is like an extremely hard cycle to break. So, would the kind thing for me to do as a straight white male is to be as insensitive as we stereotypically are in this interview because that would reward whatever stereotype you might be holding as opposed to if I'm like really sensitive and right here in present, that might give you a cardiovascular response

that would be dangerous. There might be a surprise, like if you're responding in a way that violates a stereotype, it might be a little bit surprising or uncomfortable, but I would like to get over that discomfort and enjoy the kind of sensitivity that you're offering. Absolutely. I'll do my best. I'm sort of barely civilized. So we'll see.

I'm being slightly facetious here, but this is, and I know this from some limited amount of personal experience, this is really hard work when you do it on yourself. And as I understand it, this path for you has been wrenching at times. It's really difficult. You know, sometimes people ask, well, what can I do? How can I start down this path of trying to tackle my own biases? And I really, what I think is the first step is self-reflection, introspection, which sounds simple, but as you know, as a meditator, it can be challenging to separate yourself from the person who's having the thoughts, to

the person who's observing the self, having the thoughts. And observing thoughts that are in violation of who we think we are or the kinds of values that we want to uphold can be extremely wrenching. Yeah, and absolutely, I mean, every time I'm confronted with my own bias in my own mind, it's concerning and disturbing. But I think the good news is that over time, it becomes easier to see it, like with meditation, over time,

it becomes easier to observe the practice, the habits and the patterns of your own mind, and hold those patterns more loosely and pause before acting on an immediate reaction or a kind of a reflex. If you're comfortable, I'd love to go through some of the specific tough moments for you in the course of reporting this book, which is a many-year process. I know there was at one point you wrote an article for the Atlantic, I believe, about a company

that was doing a lot of work on implicit bias. I think that company was slack, which many of us used for workplace communication. And there was a little bit of pushback. Can you tell us about how that went down for you? Yeah, so I wrote this story that looked at this particular company and their approach to trying to improve diversity in the company. So I researched this story and I spoke with a number of people at the company about some of the initiatives that they had put in place and did what I thought was my due diligence. I reached out to a couple of people who didn't respond to interview requests.

And so I went ahead and wrote the story and after the story was published, I got a lot of positive feedback from people who said, you know, this really helps me understand how I can put better initiatives into place in my company and was very valuable. And then there were some people who were upset about the story and expressed that there was a sense of paternalism. That was really concerning for me to receive that feedback and to try to understand how of this story that I was intending to have a really positive effect could itself be embodying some of the negative qualities that I was actually trying to work against. And the experience of getting that negative feedback and kind of working through it was an emotional journey for me.

I mean, first, I went through a feeling of denial. I don't think this is really true. I sort of rejected the accusation. I went through a feeling of kind of bargaining. Oh, well, if I'd been able to get certain interviews, then maybe I wouldn't have come across that way. And as I was kind of going through this emotional experience, I was like, wait a second, those are really familiar

emotions like anger, denial, bargaining. Oh, that's grief. Those are the stages of grief. And then I started asking myself, like, what am I grieving? What's going on here? I think I was grieving, well, I'm not totally sure. Maybe I was grieving my own innocence, the loss of a sense that I was immune somehow to some of the negative patterns that I was also trying to work against. And I mean, maybe it sounds trite to say, but I mean, I think I did get to a point of acceptance,

which is one of the final stages of the grieving process. And being able to look closely at some of the assumptions that I had made going into that article, going into the writing and editing, and being able to sort of hold them up to the light and accept some of the assumptions that I had made as being bad assumptions, realizing the mistakes that I had made was ultimately really essential. It was a painful process to go through.

I think anybody who's ever received feedback whether it's on bias or the color scheme you chose for a party, that will sound familiar to anybody who's ever received feedback. What's coming to mind is this concept of white fragility. I know Robin DiAngelo who wrote that book, white fragility is controversial. So I'm not here to pass judgment on whether work is good or bad, but the concept is compelling, I think. And I wonder whether many white people get stuck in the denial and are not willing to go all the way through the stages of grief to acceptance and maybe improved comportment. Yes, very much so. In fact, one of the experts who I interviewed for my book, who's a social psychologist, who works with companies in trying to create more inclusive organizations, said that

where she sees people get stuck the most is in in the process of working against bias and discrimination is persisting after a mistake persisting after a misstep being able to experience the emotional difficulty and all of the emotions that go through on shame guilt defensiveness angry, you know all these feelings and then being able to move through it and defensiveness, anger, you know, all of these feelings, and then being able to move through it and move toward acceptance and positive action. I think that's, I mean, you know, resume mannequin who is one of your guests as well talks about doing reps, you know, these are reps that we have to do. We have to kind of build up a certain amount of fitness to be able to face

what's happening in ourselves and keep moving forward. But I mean, I think white fragility is, it's such a, I mean, we could have a whole conversation about white fragility. I think it is a useful concept. I think that she defines it as an inability to tolerate racial stress. I believe that's her definition of white fragility. I think that there's something really deep beneath that, which is an unexplored but felt sense of horror and shame. I think that's what is beneath that inability to tolerate racial stress.

And I think that's the level that we have to get to in order to move through it and take positive action to change. And the horror and shame is a result of the fact that the workings of our mind, our behavior in the world, often will subconsciously not meet up to the story we tell ourselves about being a good person. Yes, that's part of it. I think there's also, I mean, part of my journey in writing this book was also really studying history and, you know, the origin of some of these toxic lies that we absorb. And so I think that the horror and shame is not only a feeling like in the moment we might be

behaving in a way that violates our values that might be hurting someone unintentionally. I mean, that's hard to countenance. No one wants to hurt someone. Most people don't want to hurt people. But I think there's another level of horror and shame, which is a felt connection to an inheritance that is a horror-filled and shameful inheritance and the sense of being a beneficiary of a hideous inheritance, which is the inheritance of racism and racial hierarchies.

And it's so painful. We don't want to look at it. So we stay in denial and spin. I think that we say it a lot. Yeah, I think it's very common. One of the points I know you make is that you came to see that your own tendencies toward bias, whether it has to do with racism or sexism, were not just hurting other people, but they were hurting you. But can you say more about that, please? This was a really essential part of my journey

in understanding and combating bias. It was a really essential step, which was moving from, I think, where I started, even before writing this book, where I started, and I think where a lot of people are, is a sense that bias and discrimination are essential to combat because they harm other people in significant ways, which is absolutely true, and the consequences can be lethal. I think what I didn't understand earlier on in my process was the way that these biases that I was perpetuating on other people were also really harming me. And that move from what you might call like a saviouristic mentality, like, I possess all the goods and I need to, you know, extend my

beneficence toward others so that they can benefit from my large ass, going from that kind of saviouristic mindset to an understanding that I'm also harmed and we're connected and the harm that I perpetuate on others harms me is really, I think, at the root of moving beyond this kind of, I don't know if there's another word, then, sabiuristic, moving beyond this kind of like simplistic notion of how change gets made. What I found was that my perpetuating of bias or discrimination or unintentional unexamined prejudices against other people was creating a sense of disconnection, separation, moving away from kind of the flow of life and into more of a lonely, disconnected existence or

experience. It was also disconnecting me from reality. Baldwin talked about this like decades and decades ago that white supremacy is a delusion and it harms white people because it causes them to be trapped in a delusion. There's a philosopher named Charles Mills who says one of the ironies of white supremacy is that white people have created a world that they cannot understand. White people have created a world

that they cannot understand. And I think that that separation from the reality of the world is another really deleterious consequence of this whole system that we're involved in. What does that mean? Why people have created a world that we cannot understand? Maybe he means that it's not natural to have this kind of culturally imposed stratification. Yes, human beings have always had caste systems, but on some level to be locked in a delusion

of your own superiority and unexamined delusion that is nonetheless quite powerful in terms of its motivating your behaviors is to not see the world as it is. And on some level, you know that the world isn't really like that, and this cognitive dissonance just kind of breaks you after a while. Yeah, and also, I mean, I think that when we interact with one another through this, like, lens of delusion, then we can't actually be authentic with one another either. And so, if you're interacting with me, and I believe that you're bringing prejudices to our interaction, then I can't actually be truthful with you. I can't share what's authentic about me with you. And then you can't understand me

and you can't understand the world. And I can't be authentic with you either if I don't see you as like fully human. Yes. There's also, I mean, the argument I've heard and I think this really kind of goes nicely with what you're saying. I believe the argument was made on this show by a gentleman named Lama Rod Owens.

And I think I'm giving credit to the right person here, but I remember him saying something to the effect of to force yourself, again, probably subconsciously, to not see the inequities and inequities in our society leads to a kind of heart-hardening that creates stress for you and disconnection. And that it's subtle, but that's a real pain that white people or anybody in a dominant or privileged group is carried. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think that in a sense being able to move through the world with a feeling of like comfort and ease as a white person requires the denial of other suffering and requires what you might call a barbarous indifference to pain. And I think that over time that does dehumanize the self.

It does harden the heart in a way that is not good, is not healthy, is not human. I think that's what happens to police in many cases. That's what I saw when I was interviewing police officers. Because I was very interested in how police can change their behaviors and I spoke with dozens of police officers and absolutely sensed and heard and saw that the kinds of daily experiences that officers have contributes to a

gradual roding of their humanity. I think there are a lot of officers that would actually candidly agree with that. They're quite open about how it affects them. I want to talk a lot more about what works and what doesn't work to in your terminology and bias. But let me just stay with you for a second. Did you start out this process thinking,

well, I'm not immune to bias, but I'm not as biased as everybody else. I'm not saying that with any judgment because that's a assumption I've carried around too. Yes. Yeah. And I think most of us probably fall into that category of thinking, yeah, bias is definitely a problem.

It's probably more of a problem for other people than me. I'm probably in a slightly better position to be able to really tackle it and talk about it. And I was very humbled through the process of doing this research to find that I was really no different and had a lot of work to do myself. I particularly saw sexism in my own mind, unexamined ways that I was making assumptions and discriminating against women,

a group that I belong to, and that was a whole journey in and of itself. What did that look like? First of all, I would say it's an ongoing process. I think we're all constantly in some sort of transformation, hopefully towards something more life-giving and life-affirming. And I think for me, part of this process was really asking the question, where do these ideas come from?

And so I dug into the history to try to understand the origins of racism and also the origins of patriarchy. And in the process, discovered, first of all, that patriarchy predates the written record. So it is really old, thousands and thousands of years old. And so old, in fact, that in order to try to find the origins of patriarchy, they have to look at like bones and try to deduce how people were buried to see if there were moments when the Mesopotamia area, men and women were treated

somewhat equally by looking at their burial practices. So I think for me, digging into the history of the patriarchy and how it evolved over time, helped me see both how deeply it is woven into the fabric of every aspect of our life, but also how I had absorbed those ideas. And so I started to notice, for instance, just how I reacted to men and women differently. I mean, how I interpreted a piece of writing

if it was by a man or a woman, or how I responded instinctively to an email from an unknown email address if it was from a man or a woman. These are things I think that happened so quickly and so automatically that it's very hard to observe them unless you're pretty motivated to really try to examine them. And once I was able to see the machinations of bias in my own mind, I was able to start to interrupt question and interrupt them more consistently, but it was humbling to see

how those patterns played out. I mean, I'm curious, I'll turn the question to you, is that something that you have thought about or practiced specifically with regard to sexism? 100%. I mean, I don't want to overstate how much I've thought about it or practiced it, but definitely I've had many, many humbling moments. I'll give you one example.

Nearly three years ago, actually more than three years ago, one of the early employees of the company that I co-founded, which is called 10% Happier, wrote an email to the co-founders. There are three of us, all white men. She, the woman who wrote the email, is a woman, and pointed out that at that time, we had 10 full-time employees, all men, not all white men, but all men. And we had a bunch of part-time employees of which she was one who were women, but we didn't have any full-time women. And we had at that time just made a new hire who was a white man.

And this was after she had brought it up with us over and over and over again. And she felt, I think, with no small amount of justification that things were going in the wrong direction. Took a lot of courage for her to write that email. I, however, responded to it internally into those first few seconds of reading it, and then maybe in the first day or two of thinking about it before I actually responded in real life with what you described earlier, the sort of stages of grief denying it, being angry that it was written in the first place, et cetera, et cetera.

It triggered ancient storylines that I carry around about being a monster. And then I got to the point of, and so did my co-founders of like, she's absolutely right. We're late on this, but we're not so late that we can't do anything. Committees were formed, and three plus years later, I think the company is well over 50% female. We have a lot more work to do on the leadership level of the company is way too male and white, but a lot of strides have been made, and we've all learned a ton. So yeah, that's just one embarrassing story story and I could regale you with many.

Can I ask you a follow up question? Sure. You said that she had brought this up like numerous times before she wrote the email. If you're willing to be honest, what went through your mind all of the previous times that she brought it up? Like why did it not trigger any kind of meaningful change earlier? So I'll give you the honest answer. I actually had been making a lot of noise about this internally. I come from a culture at ABC News, which is my day job at the time, which is very diverse. We have plenty of cultural problems, but in particular, the show that I was the anchor of, nightline was, I think, 80% female and extremely heavy on people of color, women of color.

And so I had been pounding the table on this for a while, but had not been hurt. Nonetheless, I knew that I hadn't done enough. Clearly I hadn't done enough. And I had enormous amount of power in the company and nothing had changed. And I don't think there was any ill will there. I know there was an ill will there on the part of my colleagues. It was just running a startup as it's like a rolling existential crisis. You're always on the cusp of death and we need help. And so we just reach out reflexively to the people we know in our network. And as three white men, the people we know in our network in the tech world were mostly white men. And so that's how we got into that predicament. We had to diversify our pipelines.

We did a bunch of readings and form committees about how to learn how to better interact with women in the workplace, how to create a workplace. That's more hospitable to women, given that the modern workplace was created by men for men. So we had to do a lot of learning. So I don't think it was the case. And if my female colleague who wrote that email

was on the show, maybe she would have a different story. I think she would say that she saw me behaving in ways that were not optimal, but I don't think she would say, I said to Dan, we need more women in this company and Dan said, that's a dumb idea or we're doing great. But in her email, she did tell a story about how I had made a joke that made her uncomfortable. So I don't want to portray myself as blameless. Yeah, and I didn't mean to portray myself as blameless. Yeah, and I didn't mean to put you on the spot. I was just curious.

You know, I just think it's so interesting because even just things as sort of slippery and fleeting as like what sorts of feedback to take seriously are also influenced by these patterns we've been talking about. So yeah, it becomes challenging. Yes, you can put me on the spot anytime you want, so don't worry about that.

Well, I will take you up on it for sure. Please. No, I mean, I appreciate it because I wish I had more opportunities to talk to men about the way that gender bias plays out in their own minds. I think that in the aftermath of me, too, one thing I feel like that was missing was really an opportunity for men to interrogate how we let this happen and look inward.

And maybe it's because we have such a litigious society, people didn't feel safe to do it or because we have a very blame and shamed society, they didn't feel emotionally safe to do it. But I appreciate the chance to talk about it because I think it can be difficult to talk about some of these patterns in an honest way. One of the difficulties for me among many, and you listed a few, was that my mom was a, she was retired now, but she was a celebrated academic physician and editor at the New England Journal of Medicine, a trailblazer for women in medicine.

I'm married to an incredibly impressive academic physician in a Freudian twist. And so it's just contrary to the story I tell myself about myself, and this is just echoing things you've already said in this conversation. When confronted with evidence, irrefutable evidence to the contrary, the psyche goes into crisis. Much more of my conversation with Jessica Nordell

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You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. So I know this is a question you get a lot, but I'm going to ask it because I think it's really interesting. What do we do about it? Six years of writing the book, 10 years of research, inclusive of the writing of the book, you've done a lot of homework here. What have you learned about what works and doesn't work? And we can talk about the individual and the systemic levels, but let's start with the individual level. What have you learned about what we can do to not be so owned by these culturally implanted stories that trip us up?

Well, I can tell you what doesn't work to start with. What doesn't work is believing that one is objective and has no role in this. It's a very common response. And like as you and I were just talking about earlier, to think, well, maybe that's a problem for other people, but it's probably not really a problem for me. That really doesn't work. There's research where people were asked to kind of dwell on their own objectivity. And then were shown resumes with with a male name and a female name. Groups were shown the same resume, but only the name was manipulated.

That was one group. And then another group was shown the resumes first and then asked about objectivity later. And the group that had first been kind of primed to think about their own objectivity showed more bias, actually, between the male and female resume choice. So thinking that your objective probably only serves to make you trust your biases even more because you don't think you have to worry about it.

Another thing that doesn't work is saying, oh, well, I'm color blind or I'm gender blind. I just see everybody the same. There was a study of a large healthcare organization and the researchers looked at different departments in the extent to which they practiced color blindness versus like multiculturalism or exploring people's differences. And the researchers found that in the departments where color blindness was sort of the predominant way of handling difference, employees of color detected more bias and felt more discriminated against.

So these are really common strategies and they don't work. So what does work? So there are a lot of different things that have been shown to change people's behavior. That's the good news. That they're not easy or automatic or simple, but they do change behavior. So the first is what I mentioned earlier,

which is awareness, becoming aware of discrimination both out in the world, and also the patterns of discrimination in one's own mind is a really important first step. There's really robust research about a particular type of training where people are given material to boost their awareness and increase their motivation and then given strategies to combat bias. And this awareness seems to be a really key component in changing behavior. And this particular training is really effective in changing people's behavior even years later.

They see changes in how people act. What is the name of that training or how could we do this in our own lives in a way that might give us some confidence that we're doing something that actually works? Sure. So this particular training was developed at the University of Wisconsin by a researcher named Patricia Devine. She has a team of people that conduct this. They've been working on this particular bias intervention workshop, I think for about 10 years now, refining it and developing different iterations of it. And it's kind of based on a cognitive behavior therapy model, which is that in order to change, you have to have awareness that there's a problem,

you have to be motivated to change the problem, and then you have to have awareness that there's a problem, you have to be motivated to change the problem, and then you have to have replacement strategies. In this particular training, they give you all of the sort of a succinct presentation of how bias works and what its impact is in the world, how serious its consequences are. These are designed to increase awareness and motivation, and then they give you sort of a palette of strategies to use. And the strategies include things like looking

for alternative explanations for a person's behavior. Once you realize that you're making an assumption about the reason for someone's behavior coming up with alternative explanations, developing meaningful relationships with people of other groups, that's a whole other strategy, which I can talk about in more detail. And there are like a few other strategies that they offer. So these three things together, the kind of awareness, motivation, and strategies,

they have found actually changes people's behavior. So after going through this particular training, college students were more likely to speak up about discrimination when they witnessed it in an online context. A set of university science and math departments ended up hiring more women when they went through a gender-focused version of this training. So these components seem to be helpful in changing people's behavior in the real world. Another strategy that is extremely helpful is mindfulness, actually.

Mindfulness and meditation seem to have an effect on a lot of different aspects of bias. There are, I mean, I'm sure, as you know, like compassion meditation has shown to create more altruistic responses to people who are in other groups. There's some really interesting research by a neuroscientist named Unicang, who found that after six weeks of meditation, people's responses to the implicit association test went to zero. This is a test that looks at, are you familiar

with the implicit association test? I have to. Yeah, as far as I know know though, it's pretty controversial. It is really controversial. Yeah. And it's unclear exactly what it measures. So we could like talk about the IAT controversy too. But it's an interesting finding that she found consistently people's responses to this test that at least purportedly looks at automatic associations, people responded as though they

had no bias in their associations. Now, that could be that their biases, it could be that they just got better at self-control. There are different explanations for what could be going on here. But one piece of research that I found really interesting was about the impact of loving kindness meditation. Some neuroscientists found that people who had were really practiced in loving kindness meditation. Some neuroscientists found that people who had were really practiced in loving kindness meditation who were shown images of themselves and images

of someone else, over one area of the brain, they showed more similar responses to looking at an image of the self and looking at an image of the other than people who were not experienced loving kindness meditators. It was like really so fascinating, but maybe over time, certain kinds of meditations start

to actually erode some of this strong distinction between the self and other. There are many other approaches that work as well. Those are just a few. Just staying with meditation for a second. How solid would you say the science is right now that meditation be it mindfulness meditation or loving kind of meditation can help us erode our biases, either within the realm of our own mind or in how we comport ourselves in the world? Well, I would say the science is still in pretty early stages about the effect of mindfulness

and other kinds of meditation on bias, but we do know some things that are pretty solid, which are that bias is exacerbated by things like stress, cognitive load, emotional dysregulation, time pressure, things like this. And we know that meditation can act against those things. So a mindfulness and other kinds of meditation can improve emotional regulation, can decrease stress, decrease cognitive load. So there's sort of an indirect link. So I would say that the science is pretty new, but there does seem to be promising evidence that it can have a positive impact. And we certainly do have really good evidence that loving kindness meditation creates more other directed altruistic behavior.

So it's interesting if I'm here you correctly, there's some evidence that kind of directly suggests that meditation can reduce bias, but there's also a pretty solid inference one can make in that stress can boost the odds that we're biased or owned by our biases, and meditation is good for stress, and therefore, by the transitive property, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, another pretty interesting and compelling piece of evidence is that we do know that our behavior toward other people is actually more predicted by our emotional response than our cognitive response. Our feelings are a really good predictor of how we're going to act.

And we know that mindfulness is an effective way of achieving more emotional regulation. So that's another sort of like, inferential piece of evidence about why it can be helpful. You talked about other modalities for reducing bias. One of them is having relationships with people who are different from you. I suspect some people might hear that and say, well, how do I do that? Yes, yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of a chicken and an egg problem here, which is that if you

are nervous or uncertain about having relationships with people who belong to different social identities, then it can be hard to have those relationships, which are maybe necessary for actually sort of eroding some of the biases. So is your question like, how does one go about doing that? Or should I? I could talk more about like, what the science is about how that actually works? Well, it was an inarthfully posed question. I definitely want to hear about the science. And I suspect there are people who are worried we increasingly live in homogenous bubbles or

carefully curated information bubbles as well. And so I think it's been referred to as the great sorting. The bubbles can be ideological, they can be racial, and it's may not be the easiest thing for people to go out and approach somebody who doesn't look like them and say, will you be my friend or can we work cooperatively and something so I can reduce my biases, et cetera, et cetera. Right, right.

And there's certainly the risk of creating some kind of perverse situation in which a person of another social identity becomes like an instrument of self-improvement for the self. I think part of it is really being open to opportunities. I mean, many of us are confronted throughout our day to day with an opportunity to either move toward more homophily and homogeneity or more plurality and

inclusivity. And by homophily, I mean literally love of the same. That's kind of one of the key biases that humans are susceptible to, which is when we have the opportunity to choose a person, we often choose someone who's a lot like us, whether it's hiring someone, like in the example that you gave, or choosing a friend, or choosing a kind of part of town to live in. We are drawn to that, which is a lot like ourselves. So I think part of it is just keeping one's eyes and ears open for opportunities that come along and maybe being more aware of one's own tendency to gravitate toward sameness or homogeneity. And maybe it comes up in the kinds of choices that we make where to send our children to

school, what part of town to live in, what sorts of relationships to pursue, what sorts of organizations to participate in, volunteer opportunities to pursue. I think there may be more opportunities for connection than we initially maybe realize, but it takes some intentionality. I love the phrase you used because the intentionality has to be on a couple of levels. In the one hand, yes, it sounds like it would be good for you as an individual and good for the world to take advantage of opportunities to get some diversity in your life and to be able to have relationship across lines of difference. Another hand you don't want to and this is the phrase you use that I like. Use

other people as an instrument in your own self-development agenda. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so there's certainly a lot of sensitivity, awareness, and vigilance to that danger. I think it was in the 1950s that a psychologist named Gordon Alport developed this idea of the contact hypothesis. I don't know if you're familiar with the contact hypothesis. So basically, he was trying to understand why some situations lend themselves to the decrease of prejudice. And he hypothesized that there are like conditions that have to be met in order for people to decrease their own tendency to discriminate toward one another.

And those are equal status, cooperation toward a common goal, and the imprimatur of an authority or an institutional authority, that this interaction is okayed by some kind of like larger authority. And so this has been tested in a lot of contexts. And this social scientists are always looking for an absolute answer to whether something works or not. And I would say that the exact details of like how and why and when contact works are still in development are still being researched. But there is some really compelling and interesting evidence

that when people work cooperatively on a common goal under the eGIS of an institutional authority, it actually changes people's behavior. So like, there's an amazing study that looked at a cricket team where men of different casts in India were team members on the same cricket team and found that compared to men who did not share a team with members of other casts, the men who played together, worked together, collaborated together, worked teammates, experienced like the entire process of being a team member

with someone of a different cast. Later, we're more likely to choose someone of a different cast as a future teammate, and we're more likely to be friends with someone of a different cast. And that's just one study, but there are many studies that show that this collaborative, cooperative work. And I think cooperative is a really key element. This isn't one group extending charity to another. These are people working together as equals. This seems to be

an effective way of decreasing the kinds of prejudice that are so harmful. I mean, we see it in soldiers who fight side by side as well. That's another context where we see prejudice start to erode. It's making me think, join the Rotary Club or do social service work where you're fully equalized. It doesn't matter what your status is in the larger society coming in. You're gonna build something together. You're going to feed people together, or you're gonna join a school board,

or whatever it is, that sounds like it could be a really good way to derive the benefits you're describing. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Much more of my conversation with Jessica Nordell after this. Absolutely. Much more of my conversation with Jessica Nordell after this. As I understand it, another thing that you recommend and you did touch on this earlier, but I think it's worth going a little bit deeper on it now, is studying history.

Yeah, I mean, there's research about this and I can also speak from personal experience that studying history is an extremely powerful way of tackling bias. The research has to do with something called the Marley hypothesis, which is named after Bob Marley, who said, I think the quote is, if you know your history, then you'll know where you're coming from.

And a few researchers have looked at what happens when people understand more about history. I think in one study, white participants were taught about the US government's role in creating discriminatory housing policy and how this impact housing segregation. And they later acknowledged more and understood more present-day racism than the participants who didn't gain that historical knowledge. So there's something about seeing the past that allows us to be able to connect it to the present and see the present more clearly. I found that in my own experience reading deeply into the the history of racism, the origins of racism, the history of

patriarchy, the trajectory of patriarchy in society, allowed me to both see the machinations of these ideas in my own head and the way that I inherited them and also allowed me to hold them more lightly. I don't know if there's another way of saying that. I think it was seeing present day bias and discrimination as the legacy of a long history of toxic lies, both allowed me to see it more clearly and also be able to let it go more. I felt its grip on me was less strong

when I understood where it came from. That this is a cultural invention. This is a human invention. This is not natural, it's not ordained from above. This is something we humans created to very ill effect. And we humans have the capacity to turn it around, seeing that cultural contingency, I think, was a really important step for me.

It was an important phase in my own journey. I think that's a massively powerful and important point. I just built on it a little bit. A friend of mine, it was a meditation teacher by the name of Seven A. Solace, she's been on the show a number of times. She likes to quote, I believe it's Krishna Murthy, who said something to the effective.

You think you're thinking your thoughts, but actually you're thinking the culture's thoughts. And that is really helpful, just to not have to blame yourself for these horrid thoughts that are skittering through your consciousness at any given moment. And once you take the blame and the shame out of the game, then you can look at the thoughts more forthrightly

and not be so owned by them. I would just add to that that loving kindness meditation is really useful in terms of kind of reducing the amount of inclement, whether that may be in your mind at any given moment, vis-a-vis yourself, and that in my experience, I don't know if there's any data to back this up in my experience, I'm a little less horrified, I'm a little warmer to myself in those moments where I see that I'm thinking something that's completely unfair and ungrouted. Yeah, and I think the really important addition to that is that space of possibility that opens up when we see that these are not preordained

and that we have the capacity to change, that possibility is so fertile, we can actually choose another path. And I think it's incumbent on us to choose another path. I mean, we've seen the horrible consequences of not choosing another path. And so I don't want to leave it as like we just need to feel compassionate toward ourselves and continue doing what we have always been doing. It's like, we want to feel compassion toward ourselves so that we are able to move in a direction of connection and inclusivity and fairness toward our fellow humans.

I think that's undeniably true and I'm glad you made that point. Just to sum up and I don't know if I'm going to sum up correctly, I'll take a stab at it and you'll correct me if I'm wrong. After an enormous amount of research on your end, it sounds like there are a number of strategies that you've found that have evidence behind them that an individual can take to reduce their bias and those include taking a bias training that has evidence to support it, meditation, cooperating with people who are different from you, learning about history, and perhaps most importantly,

you said this earlier, but I'm going to add it back here, persistence not giving up when inevitably you screw up. Mm-hmm. Yes, absolutely. And then additionally, there are a lot of strategies that organizations can also take. You and I have talked mostly about interpersonal interactions, but if you think about how these biases can have really dilaterious consequences in larger organizations when you have a lot of people interacting with one another that's another kind of important dimension as well.

I'd love to hear a little bit about that because I sometimes come across studies that show that these expensive corporate bias trainings are these expensive corporate bias trainings are neutral to negative. But I don't have the data at my fingertips. I just recall seeing articles like that. So, what does work? Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of approaches that can be effective in organizations. Looking at the practices of the organization, I think, is incredibly important. So, what are the sort of policies and practices that are in place

and where is bias coming in? I think the place to start is not like, is our organization biased, but like in what ways does bias show up in our organization? Where are these patterns happening? Because they are. They are happening. They're happening everywhere. So where are these patterns showing up? Where are these patterns showing up and hiring or

promotions or even interpersonal interactions? Who's voices are heard? Who's getting interrupted? Who's ideas are acted on? These are all really important questions for organizations to ask. And then I think once you sort of do that analysis with hopefully maybe the help of like a consultant or somebody who comes in to help an organization and look through those things, then there are a number of things that can be done. I'll give you one example, which is coming up with really structured, consistent, transparent criteria for making decisions. If we know that we are going to be inclined toward homophily, that we're going to be inclined toward choosing that, which is the same, then one way to combat that in a formal way is to develop a list of criteria that everyone agrees on for making a decision that might be influenced by homophily, for instance, when considering a new hire rather than looking at a resume and interviewing someone and deciding whether

they seem like a culture fit, which is a criteria that a lot of people use in organizational decisions. Having a set of criteria that are decided on ahead of time and then looking to see if that candidate meets those criteria is one way to formally decrease the influence of bias on decision making. Every organization is going to be different, but a larger question for any organization to really ask itself is, why is this important? What is our fundamental motivation for trying to achieve an unbiased workplace or an inclusive

workplace. And what do we hope it will achieve? So there's a classic study by business professors Robin Ealy and David Thomas. David Thomas is now the president of Morehouse College, but he was a Harvard Business School professor along with Robin Ealy when this classic study was published. And what they were interested in was understanding why some organizations functioned well in the context of diversity and some organizations did not function well.

And they found that there were three different motivations or expectations for what diversity would achieve in an organization. One set of motivations was really about justice and equality. And the idea was these teams were interested in pursuing diversity because they thought that it would help the organization live up to its ideals. There was another set of motivations that was really about business opportunities, that it was important to have a diverse set of motivations that was really about business opportunities, that it was important to have a diverse set of employees because it would open up new business avenues.

And then there was a third set of motivations, which were about the fundamental functioning of the organization. And in these teams, they felt that diversity was important because it was essential to the future of the company. It was essential to the functioning of the company to have all of these different perspectives and have them integrated well and included. And the first two examples, the first two kinds of motivations about pursuing justice inequality and opening business opportunities did not function that well actually. It was the teams where the motivation was about the fundamental functioning of the company,

teams where they believed that it was important to include everyone's ideas and make sure that everyone felt safe and that people had influence because those ideas were essential to the company, that those perspectives were essential to the company, that those perspectives were essential to the future of the company, when the leaders at that organization felt that diverse perspectives were essential to the functioning of the organization, and that this was a source of wealth,

this was actually a source of like essential resource for the organization, the organization functioned in a better way. People were able to have disagreements and move beyond them, resolve conflict, learn from one another, sort of all of the benefits of diversity were able to be realized. And it really had to do with the fundamental motivation. So I think that's something that's really important for organizations to ask themselves, like, what are we really trying to do here?

And do we believe that all of these perspectives are fundamentally important? I think that's what organizations really have to start in order to make these changes. It's a fascinating point. And what it brings to mind for me, you'll tell me if this is an appropriate association is an article in the New York Times magazine I read several years ago by Charles DuHig about a mad Dash a long frustrating Internal research project at Google where they were trying to figure out what was the common denominator Among the teams that function the best and for a long time they couldn't figure it out until they arrived on an answer

Which was something called psychological safety, which is the feeling within a team that everybody was willing and able to speak up. And so I, for years, was terrible at creating psychological safety. I was still struggled to do it. And seeing that was such an eye-opener for me and really put it on my radar as something I need to continually strive to do. So anyway, that came to mind for me as you were talking. Does that make sense?

Not only does it make sense, but psychological safety is actually the link between diversity and performance. So people talk a lot about the benefits of diversity that organizations are more creative and have better problem solving. That's not actually true necessarily because all of the power dynamics that exist in the real world can just be recreated in a workplace. But research does show that if everyone feels psychologically safe, if everyone feels they can learn from one another, they feel safe enough to learn from one another,

then diversity becomes this huge resource that allows for better performance. This has been such a fascinating conversation. I want to congratulate you. I know that your book, I've said this a couple of times, I'm just marveling at how much time you invested in producing this book, 10 years of research, six years of writing on the book, I think you mentioned at one point off mic to me that you spent four months doing fact checking alone. So it's monumental achievement. It's such an important subject. So congratulations on finishing it

and putting it out into the world. And thanks for coming on the show. Thanks so much, Dan. Thanks again to Jessica. The show is made by Samuel Johns, Gabrielle Zuckerman, DJ Casimir, Justin Davy, Kim Bica, Maria Wartelle, and Jen Poient with audio engineering from our good friends over at Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Wednesday with the aforementioned Robert Wright.

He was going to talk about some of his own attempts to challenge his own biases and tribal instincts. That's coming up on Wednesday. Hey, hey prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and ad free with 1-3-plus in Apple podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.