The One You Feed - How to Overcome Unconscious Bias with Jessica Nordell

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

Jessica Nordell is an award-winning author, science writer, and speaker known for blending rigorous science with compassionate humanity. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and many others. She is the recipient of a Gracie Award from American Women in Radio and Television, was named a Best New Poet by Tracy K. Smith, and was a 2022 featured speaker at SXSW. In this episode, Eric and Jessica discuss her book, The End of Bias: A Beginning: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias. But wait, there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue tathe conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you! Jessica Nordell and I Discuss How to Overcome Unconscious Bias and… Her book, The End of Bias: A Beginning: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias What bias is and how prevalent it is Her personal experience being on the receiving end of another person’s bias Homophily The implecations of prejudice being a habit and a result of conditioning How labels and categorizing plant seeds of bias Ways to lessen the impact of categories on our perspectives Why being “color blind” can be so harmful to people (despite the well-meaning approach) Taking on more and broader perspectives helps us better understand the world Seeing the groups we don’t belong to as just as complex as our own group The fundamental attribution error The role of empathy in dissolving biases Hyper-objects Jessica Nordell links: Jessica’s website Twitter Instagram By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! If you enjoyed this conversation with Jessica Nordell, check out these other episodes: The Element of Choice with Eric Johnson How to Change Anyone’s Mind with Jonah BergerSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We might believe that we're people who treat others with fairness and justice and respect, but because we've absorbed so many toxic ideas in our culture, we can react in ways that really conflict with those values, and it can be extremely harmful for others and for ourselves. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast,

or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Jessica Nordell. She's an award-winning science and culture journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and many others. Today, Eric and Jessica discuss her book, The End of Bias, A Beginning, The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias. Hi, Jessica. Welcome to the show. Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm really excited to talk with you. Your book is called The End of Bias, A Beginning, The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias. And this is such an important topic that I'm really excited to get into it. But let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at

their grandparent says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. There are so many different sets of wolves, I feel like in my life and in my work. I think where I experienced the battle between these two wolves is in moments when I make a mistake, when I screw up, or when I fall short of my expectations for myself. Because when that happens, there is, on one hand, the kind of fearful wolf who says things like, oh, no, this is a disaster. You've totally screwed up. This is a sign that you need to stop, retreat, find safety, find comfort. Do not keep going in this direction. You don't know what you're doing and this is bad. And then there's the loving brave wolf who I try to listen to more and feed more who says,

huh, this is interesting. This is new. The fact that you made a mistake, that you screwed up, that you've kind of fell short, is maybe a sign that you're trying something new, and that you are stepping into some kind of growth or change. Because I think we're all on some kind of journey of growth and transformation, hopefully. And, you know, I think when we screw up, when we make a mistake, it's because we're on that journey, and we're going in a certain direction, and we're actually moving forward. But I think it can be easy, especially for those of us who grew up in a very critical home, critical household, it can be easy for the fearful wolf to sort of see a mistake and seize on it and amp up the self-criticism and then try to retreat. And so those are the wolves that are alive for me often. I love that. And I was struck by that at the end of the book or near the end of the book

as you were talking about how, and when we're trying to do this sort of work where we're looking at our biases and our prejudice, when we make a mistake, we very often, as you said, we retreat, we are uncomfortable, we don't want to be there. And that some people in this space even say that that's the biggest challenge is that particularly among white people who are trying to engage more in work around their prejudice is that when they feel like they've done it wrong, they run away. And I know in conversations I've had with people in this area on the show, I have that reaction. I'm just, I want to be right. I want to be good. And I'm not always, you know, because I'm learning like you. And I think that's a really important point that you make that this is a growth process. And we have to be willing, like if we were learning to ride a bike, we have to be willing to make mistakes, right? We know

we're not going to be perfect at it in the beginning. But this stuff feels very emotionally charged. Yes, absolutely. It's so emotionally charged. And, you know, when you're stepping into a context of diversity or difference, or you're you're stepping into a context of diversity or difference, or you're stepping into a situation where people are coming from lots of different backgrounds, one of the people I interviewed for the book said, your mindset has to be, I have no idea what's happening here. I really don't know what's happening. Because you don't. And inevitably, we will make a mistake. And we have to understand that that exactly is part of the learning process. I've come to think of it, the process of tackling our biases, and maybe the process of just becoming more human, is like learning a language.

And we start out not very good at it. And we have to continually practice, get a little better, screw up. We have to try it in community with others. You know, we can't just be by ourselves. And we move toward hopefully greater fluency, but it's not without flaws or, you know, or mistakes along the way. Yeah. Yeah. I love that analogy. I often use it when talking to people about the process of getting sober and sobriety because you start out and you don't know how to speak the language at all. And then over time you get better and you're like, well, I'm sober all the time, but every time I visit my mom, it's like when you're like, well, I can speak French pretty well, except when they start talking about sports, then I'm lost, you know, but eventually you kind of get it.

So I think that's a great analogy. Let's kind of jump back to the beginning and talk a little bit about what bias is. We don't even need to go into what implicit or unconscious bias is, but what is bias in general and how prevalent is it? What is bias in general and how prevalent is it? You know, when we talk about bias, my focus is more on sort of the unexamined kinds of bias, unintentional bias. But, you know, the idea is that we store a lot of information as a byproduct of growing up in a culture and living in a culture. And we store a lot of stereotypes and beliefs and associations about different groups of people in our memories. And then when we encounter a person or a situation that we recognize as belonging to a category in our culture, all of those beliefs and associations and stereotypes start to influence our interaction and our evaluation and our response to that person. The idea of sort of unintentional or unconscious bias is that this can happen without us being aware of it. It can

happen really automatically and quickly, and it can conflict with our actual values. We might believe that we're people who treat others with fairness and justice and respect, but because we've absorbed so many toxic ideas in our culture, we can react in ways that really conflict with those values. And it can be extremely harmful for others and for ourselves. Right. It's almost impossible as a human to not have our brains function this way. This is, it's what they do. Brains notice things and it categorizes things. We're always seeing the world through some set of filters. Yes. Yes, we are. And part of it is just, you know, an adaptation to the tremendous amount of information that we are constantly being flooded with. I mean, if we had to continually interpret every bit of sensory data that was

coming in, it would be overwhelming. So we, to some extent, have to make quick assumptions and categorizations in order to make sense of the world. But where we run into trouble is when those result in us responding to another person, not as an individual, but as a daydream, a hallucination, you know, that's put together from these sort of cultural ideas that we've absorbed. Yeah, you say the individual who acts with bias engages with an expectation instead of a reality, right? We're engaging with our idea of what this person or this type of person is, instead of with that person directly. Exactly. I mean, I think this is how most of us operate most of the time, honestly.

Right. You know, I had an experience about 20 years ago that made me realize how rarely it was that I encountered another person with some kind of purity or clarity. And it was an encounter I had with a poet, actually, the poet Adrienne Rich, who had come to Minneapolis, where I was living on September 12, 2001, of all days. And everyone flooded to this concert hall to see her because we were all, in such a state of just chaos and confusion. And I'd never seen so many people at a poetry event before. And she'd been a huge idol of mine for a really long time. I waited in line to see her after

her reading. And I just spent about 30 seconds with her. And she sat with me with this quality of attention that I don't think I'd ever experienced before. It was like she was really seeing me not through this like daydream haze hallucination of bias that we all, you know, bring with us in our encounters with other people. But it was like she was really, really encountering a person and not an expectation. I remember feeling like physically changed by the experience. That's how powerful it was to have someone really be present with me as an individual in that moment, in that place, in that time. Yeah, that's a beautiful story. Tell me about how prevalent is bias in

our culture? You know, I think it can be easy to say, well, you know, things have gotten a lot better. We're more of a equitable culture than we once were, which may be true. But talk about how we kind of know how much bias there is. What are some of the things that point towards it? You know, there is evidence of bias in basically every realm of human activity. realm of human activity. We see evidence of bias on the basis of race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, in medicine and healthcare. We see it in education. We see it in public safety, policing. We see it in the workplace. It's everywhere. There are thousands of studies that document that people are treated

differently on the basis of their identity, such that, you know, it's really kind of incontrovertible at this point. The reason that I focused my book on the more kind of unconscious, unexamined, unintentional bias is that this can happen even like in the helping professions, you know, even among people who really want to support others or lift others up like teachers and nurses and doctors and social workers. They can still be susceptible to these kinds of biases and they can be hard to see and hard to eradicate. Yeah, you say that bias is woven through culture like a silver thread woven through cloth. In some lights, it's brightly visible. In others,

it's hard to distinguish. And your position relative to that flashing thread determines whether you see it at all. And I thought that was such a great description of what happens. You, early in the book, talk about your encountering of bias as you were trying to get an essay published. Yeah. So in my early mid 20s, I was working as a journalist. And I had been writing for kind of local and regional publications. And I wanted to start branching out into national magazines and newspapers. And so I started pitching stories, which is what you do. And I sent out queries to editors who I didn't know, you know, they got these cold, cold pitches in their email inboxes. And I never heard back from anybody. And, you

know, I did this for a while. And at one point, I had an essay that was tied to a very specific thing happening. It was like tied to a movie that was coming out. And I knew that if I didn't place this essay, at that particular time, it would just die. It would just go, you know, it would just never, never get published. So I thought, what am I going to do? I'm not getting any responses. And so kind of in a moment of desperation, I thought, well, maybe I'll try sending it out under a different name and see if that makes a difference. And so I made a new email address for myself and sent out the same pitch. But this time, instead of as Jessica, I sent it out as JD, which I thought maybe sounded

like plausibly masculine. And the piece was accepted within a couple of hours. And it was published. And it really started my career. I started pitching as JD and using that as my byline. For a few years, I did that. And, you know, I don't think that that editor thought, I'm really going to try to reject all the queries I get from women and accept the queries I get from men. I think that there was probably much more of an unexamined pattern that was happening in that moment. Yeah, it's interesting.

more of an unexamined pattern that was happening in that moment. Yeah, it's interesting. I saw Jon Stewart talk once about diversity, and he was explaining how they ended up with way more men in the writing room. And he said, you know, we're even trying to do blind interviews, like we don't even want to know the gender, right? But the problem starts far upstream of that. It's the pitches that we get. It's the people we know. You know, I have definitely, as we've tried to make sure we have more diversity on this show, it's the same thing. It's like my cultural orientation points me towards certain things and publishers are

pointing at certain things. And it's just very interesting, you know, back to that idea of a thread. Like it's not that I'm sitting here going, well, I would like to have 80% men, white men. That's my thing, right? Right. You know, if I'm not careful, that's how it ends up. Because that's the way the system just sort of feeds things to me. And as a white man, it's what's normal. It's what feels comfortable. So again, and I think this is what we're saying, my values say diversity, but I have these implicit biases, right? Where I might be in ways I don't even understand.

Yeah. You know, one really powerful force I found especially helpful to have a name for is homophily, which means love of the same. And this is, I think, what can often explain some of the patterns that we see, where we see people hiring people who kind of resemble themselves or people associating with people who resemble themselves. There's an attraction toward the familiar. I always laugh because there's a lake near my house. And when I go walking around the lake, I see pairs of friends walking around the lake. And they often

almost are like identical twins, like even down to like the same outfit. You know, you see people sort of resemble the people that they're with often. And it's such kind of like a natural impulse that, yeah, you have to actually very consciously interrupt it if you want to not suddenly end up in a room of clones, you know, which is quite boring, in my opinion. Yeah, but I was reflecting on athletes that I've loved in the past. And I realized that the athletes I've been most drawn to are athletes that are a little bit like me. They're a little bit undersized. And so even not even just within racial elements, but it's even like, you know, body shape, all these different things. I love that. What's it homophily? Homophily. Yes. Love of the same.

Yeah, boy, that's a strong one. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, even just having language for it helps me see it in my own life. You know, I see that I sometimes I'm drawn to, you know, petite white women with very dark hair, which is, you know, that's me. You know, I'm like seeking, you know, my own reflection if I'm not careful. if I'm not careful. Yeah, yeah. The idea here that many people have said is that prejudice is a habit. Say more about what that means.

There's a researcher at the University of Wisconsin whose work really centers around this idea that prejudice can be a habit, that we may not want to react in prejudiced ways toward one another, but we're so used to it because the cycles have been repeated so many times that we can respond spontaneously and automatically toward another person using this kind of trove of stereotypes that we've stored in our head. And I think the power of that particular way of thinking about it is that

we know that habits can be broken, whether it's any kind of habit, you know, the habit of drinking or the habit of procrastinating or these habits, you know, can be broken with intentionality and with awareness and with motivation and with strategies, you know, and consistent effort, motivation and with strategies, you know, and consistent effort, daily effort toward it. Yeah. Yeah. I think everything, as I referenced earlier, is my Buddhist leanings show here. But in Buddhism, they talk about everything being conditioned. Yes. Every thought that you have is conditioned. It goes through all these layers. But if it's conditioned, it can be unconditioned. It's hard to do, but it can be done. And I think that's sort of speaking to this idea of habit. You say that this researcher talks about a belief being something people actively choose, whereas we have these associations, which are

things we absorb from our surroundings. Yes. And, you know, I think the idea that it's conditioned means also that this is culturally specific. This is not natural or inevitable. And that I find to be so, so powerful. I mean, some of the most personally moving research that I did was about other times and other cultures and other places that had different patterns, you know, that did not have the prejudice patterns that we have in our culture. And I think seeing examples from history and from other parts of the world where our patterns of white supremacy and patriarchy just weren't present, it's courage giving, really. You know, it's inspiring and it's courage giving because it helps reinforce this reality, which is that

these patterns are interruptible. You know, they're not inevitable. They're a product of culture and conditioning, not something that we're just stuck with. Right. You have a story in the book about a study that was done around putting children into different color uniforms. You want to share about that? Because I think it speaks to this point that this was a conditioned process. Yes, interesting research. So this is work by a developmental psychologist named Becky Bigler, who was trying to understand really how prejudice develops in children. to understand really how prejudice develops in children. And she has a whole body of work that really has run into a lot of ethics complaints because she's working with children and she's manipulating their environment to see how this affects their levels of prejudice toward one

another. And she primarily has looked at gender. And so one of the things that Dr. Bigler has done in her work is work with schools where she has certain classrooms of children given certain kinds of instructions and other classrooms given other instructions. by gender. The teachers would say, hello, boys and girls, or girls line up over here and boys line up over here. And those teachers were constantly reinforcing the idea of gender differences. And then she had another group of teachers who didn't label the children at all, who just said, hello, children, you know, hello, students. And what she found is that the more the children were labeled, the more it was reinforced to them that they belonged to different groups, the more gender stereotyping those children did. She's done similar work where she kind of generalized it, where she had students put

on blue shirts and red shirts, and some teachers said, hello, red shirts and hello, blue shirts, and the other group of teachers just said, hello, students. And there again, when the children were told that they were part of a group and they were constantly labeled and categorized, they started to develop stereotypes about blue shirts and yellow shirts. And so, I mean, her work is quite powerful in that it shows that labels and categories really plant the seeds of discrimination. I mean, we do a lot of categorizing and labeling in our culture. So I think it's important, you know, for us to understand how it works. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden.

And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, no really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Heart Radio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You wrote, what lays the foundation for prejudice, it seems, is not the perceptible differences between people, but how much the culture tells us these differences matter. And then you also go on to say this sequence, categorize, essentialize, stereotype,

is sort of the way this happens. And that idea of that sequence has been repeated and seen over and over and over again. Exactly. You know, and to be honest, like this is a complicated situation, because when you hear about that, one possible conclusion a person might draw is, well, we need to eliminate categories and labels, we need to kind of stop categorizing people. The problem with that, of course, is that like we have inherited categories for hundreds and in some case, thousands of years. These categories aren't going away. So what do we do?

You know, this is a real tension, I think, in this work. Well, that's right. We almost can't not do it. Is that even a sentence? I think it is. But when I teach about perspective in the spiritual habits program, I talk about like you're going to be seeing the world through some perspectives through thumbs filters. That's the way the brain works. It's can we become aware of them?

Yes. yourself, as you've gotten deeper into this work, actually realize like, oh, there I'm doing it, and are able to go, okay, let me pause. And can I allow more into this picture than just the category? Yeah, absolutely. As someone recently asked me, you know, Jessica, as you were working on this book, did you notice any biases in yourself? And, you know, my answer was, yes, all of them, literally all of them. They're all in me. They're all, you know, they're all in all of us. And the direction that we want to go is toward seeing differences, but not creating hierarchies as a consequence of those differences. You know, Audre Lorde said, we have no pattern for relating across our human differences as equals. And I think that's, you know, that's our task. That's our human task,

to be able to do that. That's what I hope for us. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. We don't. Because as you were talking about cultures that don't have, say, for example, patriarchy, right? And we go, well, that's very hopeful that they didn't have patriarchy. It means that patriarchy is not a built in thing. But we can be certain that those cultures had some form of bias and categories and all that also. So I think we are hopefully evolving to see that these things exist within us. And you talked about this a second ago about how it might lead you to think, well, you get rid of all categories, but you talk about how trying to deny differences

actually can make discrimination worse. Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that came up over and over in my interviews, I interviewed, you know, maybe 200 people, at least for this book. And one of the things that came up, again and again, particularly with African American individuals who I spoke with was that when employers or co workers sort of pretended to not see difference, sort of tried this kind of colorblind attitude, like I'm gonna pretend that, you know, I don't see that you're African American, but that was incredibly hurtful and felt like an act of erasure. And so this came up with many different groups of people that I spoke with. So I think that trying to simply pretend that these categories don't exist is

sort of, it's an erasure and it's a denial of people's experience, which is extremely important to understand and to perceive and to validate. So yeah, I mean, I think there's an inherent tension in trying to, on one hand, see people as individuals and not bring group-based ideas to our encounters with one another. And on the other hand, to recognize the importance and the history and the group experiences that people do have as a result of being categorized in our culture. Yeah, I do think it is like you're saying, it's a very nuanced and slightly difficult point that I think a lot of well-meaning people stumble

on. Because it sounds right to say, I don't see difference. It feels like that's the right thing to do. But we know from the experiences of people who are different and from lots of research out there that that approach doesn't really work. And so, like you said, it's like, how can I see the differences? Because I can't not, right? I have eyes, they work. You know, you're white, that person's black. I mean, of course, I see the difference. It's then the phrase I used earlier, and I'm wondering what you think about is how do I bring more into the picture than just that? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I love that, that kind of framing, seeing that difference as adding more information, rather than filtering

out information. Another way that I think about it is like, we need to practice three types of vision at the same time. I need to see you, Eric, as an individual, completely unique, as a member of a group that you belong to, or many groups that you belong to, because that has shaped your experience. And we can't forget also as a fellow human who has common needs and desires and dreams, just like me, because I'm a fellow human. So I think we need to hold all of these things in our heads at the same time. And it can be challenging. Right, right. I heard a phrase once, and I'm curious what you think of it based on the work that you've done. And the phrase was, it's not that stereotypes are necessarily untrue. It's just that they're incomplete.

I think it depends. I mean, I think, you know, you could say, well, a stereotype about Dutch people is that they're tall. Well, Dutch people are, on average, taller than people from many other cultures. So, you know, that's a case in which that stereotype has some truth to it. But there are a lot of stereotypes that are incomplete, in some cases, completely false, you know, that have been shaped by a particular way of viewing the world. Like, I'll give you an example. There's kind of a widespread belief that women are more risk averse than men. And this is used to explain why women are not represented in positions of leadership as much as men. This is kind of often trotted out as a justification for what we see in society.

You could say that's a stereotype about women. They're more risk averse than men. But the truth is that when we study risk, typically, the way it's studied is by looking at things like gambling tendencies or financial risks. And if you look at other ways of measuring risk, you see that women have more of a risk tolerance than men. For instance, you see that women are more likely to donate a kidney to a stranger, which is a surgery that has health risks associated. You see that during the Holocaust, women in Germany were more likely to hide Jews than men. So this is a risk to life. So, I mean, I just bring that up as an example of this kind of stereotype about women that has emerged out of like a very narrow way of thinking

about this particular characteristic. Right. Yep. It makes me think of, this is not quite the same, but there's in psychology, the famous marshmallow study. They put a kid in a room and they go, look, if you don't eat that marshmallow for five minutes, I'll give you two marshmallows. Right. And so the conclusion was the kids that didn't eat the marshmallow turned out to have much better outcomes in life. So self-control gives you better outcomes in life. And while there's some truth to that, the thing that they were missing about that study was that some of the kids were making a very wise choice to grab the marshmallow because they came from environments where they couldn't trust the people in authority. There was no reason to believe that

the person who said, I'm going to give you two marshmallows was actually ever going to do it. So we said those children don't have self-control where the issue wasn't really about self-control. It was about the environment in which they came from that told them, hey, trust is not a good idea, right? And so that's similar to what you're saying. We're looking at things through a certain lens. You talk in the book about why it was so hard for us to realize that nature is essentially cooperative. Why science thought that nature was competitive. Say a little bit about that, because I think it applies to exactly what we're saying here. Yeah. So, you know, for many decades,

the kind of broad consensus in the field of ecology was that nature is fundamentally competitive, and that species are constantly vie with one another for limited resources. What we've come to understand is that nature is also extremely cooperative, and there's mutuality in almost every, if not every, natural relationship in the natural world. And what has been proposed is that the reason that this took such a long time to see is that the scientists themselves, the ecologists themselves, who were trying to understand what was going on, themselves operated within a very competitive, capitalistic framework. And to some extent, we can only draw from the frameworks that we've been exposed to. So if we have only seen competition, then we're going to be more likely to see competition out in the world. And I think this is such an important example, because what happened was as a greater variety of people came into the field of ecology, they brought with them different perspectives and different backgrounds and different frameworks.

And the field evolved as a result. And so I think this is a really powerful example of how important it is to have a really broad variety of perspectives to help us understand the world. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's kind of the theme we've been saying here is that it's how can I be more flexible in the ways I look at things? How can I see things from multiple different angles? And that sort of leads me to something I wanted to make sure we talked about, which was something called outgroup homogeneity. Can you share a little bit about what that is? Because I think that's another fascinating concept that really applies here. This is another term that I find so helpful.

It sounds a bit like a technical term, but I find it so helpful in sort of decoding, you know, our experiences with the world. So the idea of out-group homogeneity is that when we think about a group that we're not a member of, we tend to see the members of that group as being very similar to one another, being fairly homogenous. We see that group as fairly homogenous. But on the other hand, we see our own group as being very diverse and full of people who are very different from one another. And this is really important because the more diversity you see within a group, the harder it is to stereotype the group. And the more homogenous you see a group, the easier it is to stereotype and then to discriminate against that group.

And so if we can start to understand our kind of tendency toward out-group homogeneity, toward seeing others as being kind of monolithic inside their group, we can, I think, start to interrupt that pattern and start to really seek the reality, which is that all groups are diverse and complex and nuanced and full of lots of different kinds of people. Yeah, it makes me think of, I had a girlfriend once, and she told me that the Beatles and the Kinks sounded exactly the same. And I was like, that is insane. They do not sound the same. Like, how can you even possibly think that?

But she's hearing 60s era white musicians, right? And I could make the same statement about hip hop. And certain people would be like, are you out of your mind? There is no way that Jay-Z and Tupac sound at all similar, right? And I think it's to that point. It's sort of in our little area, we can see all the differences. But when we look outside of us, we just go, well, that's all the same thing. Right, right.

You know, one, I think, illustration of the power of outgroup homogeneity and interrupting that is seen in this really interesting research that was done in France. So France is a country that struggles with a lot of anti-Arab prejudice. And these researchers, one was a French researcher of North African origin, and one was an American researcher, tried to really disrupt outgroup homogeneity as a way to try to decrease discrimination against people of Arab origin in France. And what they did was they created this poster, which had photographs of different people of Arab origin with a name and then some kind of description of the person. So it would

say Yamina, age 32, optimistic, or Anila, age 55, stingy. And the important thing was that the descriptions were both positive and negative. Some of the people were described in positive ways, and some were described as, you know, stingy or greedy or, you know, hostile or unpleasant. And so you had kind of this mix, this really rich mix of people. And what they found was that when they exposed French people to these posters over a period of time, later, the people who had seen those posters acted in more fair and kind and just ways toward people of Arab origin in the real world. So they did things like they would show this poster over a period of time, and then later have a confederate, you know, who was in on the secret, spill her purse in front of

some unsuspecting subject. And then they would see, does the subject help this person of Arab origin pick up her things or not? And they found that the people who'd seen this poster were much more likely to help, much more likely to be kind, to sit closer, to do all of these things. And this worked much better than a poster where everybody was just portrayed in a positive light. So the interpretation here is that when you start to see a group as quite different from one another, that people are not homogenous, this really makes it harder to stereotype them and ultimately disrupts discrimination and prejudice too. I found that such a fascinating part of the book,

and it speaks to this idea of the more we know about someone, prejudice breaks down. You know, it's almost as if the opposite of familiarity breeds contempt is that familiarity breeds understanding. Yeah. You know, I think the important thing is that we start to see the groups that we don't belong to as just as complex and different as our own group. The people are very different from one another. Any group, name a group, all of the people in that group, you know, they're not all the same. They are as different from one another

as we are different from the people in our group. And I think really absorbing that, really grasping and understanding that it's like an incredibly powerful tool against discrimination. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block

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Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really, No Really. Go to reallyn, really. Yeah. No, really. Go to

reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really no really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I know that I see certain groups and sort of assume that they're all similar. You know, I may have enough insight into my biases that I see certain groups and sort of assume that they're all similar. I may have enough insight into my biases that I don't think that they're bad. But I do know, as you're saying that, I'm noticing as I think about it, I'm like, oh, yeah, I do sort of go, well, they're very similar to each other. And realizing, as you're saying, that the difference within that culture is as wide as the difference within my culture, right? Which would be the difference between,

say, if you were to take a white male of my age, 50 years old, you could have one who believes fervently in Bernie Sanders, and another who believes fervently in Donald Trump. That's a pretty big difference between 50 year old white men that you wouldn't see from the outside, right? It's a pretty fundamental difference. And so if we assume, as you're saying, extrapolate that out, you know, to a 20-year-old Chinese female, that there could be that level of difference between two people there, that's a really illuminating insight. Yeah. And not only can there be, but there is actually that amount of difference. Yes, thank you, yeah, thank you. When I was working on this project,

I was also, you know, kind of constantly absorbing the news cycle and observing that when a young white man commits an atrocity, it's attributed often to some kind of individual pathology. It's a mental illness. This person is individually struggling. He's not representative of white men in general or 18-year-old white men in general. But when a person of a group who isn't a white man commits an atrocity, for instance,

if there is a Muslim person who commits a crime, this person is described as often, you know, a Muslim terrorist, not an individual with an individual pathology and perhaps a mental illness or some kind of personal struggle of alienation and isolation and disconnection that's causing this behavior. So I think we, you know, we see this tendency on broad cultural level as well. Yeah, I think if you're following the news cycle, at this point, you should almost be assuming the opposite of what you just said. Like, I'm starting to categorize 18 year old white men as like dangerous, you know, like, okay, you know, now, again, it's a stereotype. And I'm half joking, but, but it's true. You can see it start to happen right there in the workshop that you reference a lot. They offered some strategies for how to override bias. And I thought maybe we could talk through those and maybe unless you remember them off the

top of your head, I could give you them and we could just kind of discuss them. So the first one was we were just on this one, right? Notice when a stereotype arises and then actively replace it with alternate images. Yeah, that's definitely one strategy. I think that the power there is to simply create space. This goes to the Buddhist approach to create some space between the input and the reaction. And so noticing when a stereotype arises allows us to just pause, to slow down, and then to take any number of directions, right? One is to replace that image with an alternative image. Maybe if it's a negative stereotype of a person, replace it with a positive image of a person from that group. Another strategy is to try to consider the situation from the other person's perspective.

And this is really powerful. This is like beginning a path toward empathy, trying to understand why a person might be behaving in a way that they're behaving, trying to see perhaps the situational reasons for a person's behavior, rather than assume that there's something innate or essential about that person that's causing that particular behavior. Yeah, I love that one. That was the second one, which was, you know, look for situational reasons for a person's behavior, rather than assume it comes from an inherent characteristic. There's actually a name for that bias. One name of it is the fundamental attribution error. And it basically means when I do something wrong, there's a very clear reason for it.

I didn't get enough sleep last night, so that's why I was kind of grouchy to you. When you do something wrong, it's because you're a jerk. You're a jerk, right. Right. It's the fundamental attribution error. So just recognizing that and extending that out, which is to say, like you said, people do things for reasons, not necessarily for who they are. Yes. Yeah, and I mean, we could talk about a powerful intervention along these lines

that was done with math teachers, but we can also go on with the other strategies too. No, let's hear the intervention. Well, I was just thinking, you know, one kind of illustration of these approaches, interrupting stereotypes and considering another person's perspective or the situational reasons for someone's behavior was tested by an interesting psychology professor named Jason Okonofua, who recruited math teachers, middle school math teachers, to do an empathy training with students. And what Okonofua was particularly looking at was suspension rates, and particularly the disparate rates of suspension for Black and Latino students. So what he wanted to see is whether increasing teachers' empathy

might change those suspension rates. And so what he did was he had teachers do exactly what we're talking about. So he didn't frame this as a bias intervention. He just asked teachers really to recommit to kind of fundamental values of teaching, things like considering the student's perspective of trying to avoid labeling students and instead thinking about why they might be behaving in a particular way, rather than thinking, oh, well, that student's just a troublemaker or that student's just a jerk. Let's see, what were the others? It was looking at a situation from a student's perspective, avoiding labeling, thinking about situational reasons for their behavior. And he asked teachers to really focus on all of these things. And they did sort of

written reflections, and they read students' experiences of feeling respected by teachers who behaved this way. And what he found was that as a result of this intervention, suspension rates dropped, and particularly suspension rates of Black and Latino students were cut about in half. This was a really interesting approach because instead of actually targeting bias itself, he focused on trying to elevate these other values and these other ways of being, which then kind of overrode the biased tendencies. I love that. I think that's a beautiful idea. And it makes me think about one of the ideas of Buddhism that has been fundamental to me is just this teaching that every other human wants to be

happy just like me. Yes. Like when I boil it all down to that, they want to be happy just like me. They don't want to suffer just like me. Everything after that is all strategy. It's all approach. It's all culture. It's all conditioning. But underneath, we all have that basic thing. And that has been over the years for me, very transformational. As you're saying, when I notice I'm thinking negatively towards someone, which it's usually happening without me knowing the person, right? You know, I mean, it's just somebody's wearing a visor, which I happen to think is a terrible fashion choice. And I suddenly, you know, I'm judging them, right? They must be a complete idiot, right?

Yeah. Or people who back their cars into spaces in crowded parking lots. Another example where I suddenly think like this person's an awful person. I just, you know, no, that person underneath all that, they want to be happy just like me. And it takes a while to internalize that. But it's a really powerful, I think, intervention that speaks to what you're talking about. Seeing commonality instead of trying to sort of cut off a specific bias, you're trying to sort of go underneath all of them in a way. Yes. And trying to kind of elevate our best selves, you know, elevate our values and our goals. I wanted to talk about a study you participated in. I guess it was not a study, it's a simulation that you ran, which really shows how little bits of bias really accumulate over time. Can you tell me about what you guys did? Yeah, you know, one of the big questions I had when I was going into this project was, like, I thought to myself, okay, well, there's lots of evidence that this kind of bias exists. It's everywhere. It's in education, it's in healthcare, it's in public safety, it's in the workplace, it's everywhere. How much do these individual discrete moments matter in the long run? Like in other words, all of the studies focus on

kind of snapshots in time, like the moment a doctor makes a particular decision about care, or the moment an employer decides to put a resume in one pile or another pile. All of the studies look at these moments of evaluation, these specific discrete moments of decision making. But of course, bias doesn't just happen once or twice. It doesn't happen in these discrete moments. It happens continually, and it happens interactively between people, and it grows sometimes or it changes. And so I really wanted to understand how this actually accumulates over the long term, over a person's is that over a person's lifetime, when that person is constantly subjected to the racism that is present in our culture, this has a physiological wearing or weathering effect on the body that makes that person more susceptible to things like metabolic

disease or other health conditions. And so there's like a recognition that these biases accumulate into something very consequential. So I wanted to look at how this might play out in the workplace and what might be the cumulative effect of individual acts of bias over time. scientist. And we built a computer simulation of a workplace where we basically created this computer simulation of a very simplified workplace where people just do projects, and then the projects succeed or fail. And then their score is either increased or decreased, depending on whether they are succeeding or failing. And then every so often people get promoted to the next level of this company. So it's a very simplified organization with eight levels of hierarchy. And then what we did was we had, you know, male and female employees, and we introduced a handful of really common gender biases into this workplace simulation. So for instance, we had women's work be slightly devalued compared to men, they got slightly less of a promotion boost if they succeeded, or their work was more devalued if they failed. Because we see these patterns in the actual world. Women's work is, women are given less credit for successes and they're penalized more for failure. And so-

When you say slightly, you mean a couple percentage points, right? 3% was the number that we used for this simulation. Because we wanted to see what happened if you just even have a very small amount of bias that accumulates over time. Right. And so we ran the simulation, and we ran it, I think, 100 times or 200 times, and then we looked at the average results. I think, 100 times or 200 times, and then we looked at the average results. And what we found was that even with just a 3% bias against women in the simulation, over 20 promotion cycles, the top level of the workplace ended up being 87% men. So what we found, in other words, is that a very, very small amount of bias, if it's repeated frequently enough, every time a project happens, there was just a little bit of bias introduced into the evaluation, that over time, it's really, it creates really

significant kind of macro consequences. Yeah, that's really interesting. And you certainly said that one promotion cycle and you don't see a big difference. But as someone's career goes on, it explains how you get where you're going. And I think the same thing, we can extrapolate that to sort of the personal level, right? The more often we're exposed to a bias, the more we internalize it. Yes. Yes.

You know, just a little bit, just a little bit. It's sort of the idea of conditioning. It builds over time or habits entrench themselves slowly over time. The first time you smoke a cigarette, it's pretty easy to say like, I'm not going to have another. The 10,000th time you've smoked a cigarette, it's a whole lot harder. You know, one cigarette at a time, 3% at a time, these things, they add up. Exactly. And that's why I think when we talk about things like choice or free will, it becomes really complicated. You know, you could say something like women are opting out of the workplace because a particular woman is choosing to leave

her job because she has decided that she wants to do something else. But if you think about the accumulation of experiences that that woman has had that might be contributing to this ultimate decision, I think it becomes a lot more complicated and it becomes harder to say, oh, this person is just sort of freely choosing, you know, A or B. You know, instead, I think we really have to think about the conditioning that has led to that moment of decision. I think that's so true. And I think about this a lot in a lot of contexts. When we talk about choice and free will, how much choice and free will do different people have? You have it within certain constraints. And the example I use not to make everything about addiction, but it's just an easy example for people to understand is that me one day off of being on

heroin the degree of choice I had then feels I can't I don't even have words for the degree of momentedness compared to what I have now now I feel like I got a pretty good choice like if I go to do that as a choice I made but then boy the choice I had felt really slim and I think this is what you're speaking to it also makes me think of another line in your book that I absolutely loved, which is you said, for lies repeated often enough do not become truth, they become invisible. And that, you know, if we think about bias, that's what happens. We don't even know it anymore. That conditioning has happened little bit by little bit by little bit, and it just vanishes. But it's there. It's there. You know, there's a philosopher who has coined this term that I find really helpful, which is the hyper object. And the hyper object is like a phenomenon that is so big, we can't even see it. It's so pervasive and all-encompassing that we can't even perceive it. And, you know, I think of like the patriarchy as a hyper-object. It influences everything the way, you know, the entire way our society is structured. White supremacy is a hyper-object. It's so

vast and so kind of entrenched that it can be hard to even see its individual manifestations. I think that's a great term, the hyper-object. I'm looking and seeing that we are out of time. This has been amazing. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post-show conversation about two things that I am particularly interested in. One is the idea of us having different levels to ourself, which I think is a fascinating idea. And I want to talk about that. And I also want to talk about a analogy you made around mindfulness that I think is one of the best analogies

for why mindfulness works that I've heard. And so you and I will talk about that in the post-show conversation. And listeners, if you'd like access to that and other great things about being part of our community, you can go to oneufeed.net slash join. Jessica, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been a really great conversation. The book is really, really wonderful. And I think this is such important work for each of us to see in ourselves. Yeah, we all we all do this. How can we do it less?

Thank you so much for just a really enjoyable conversation, Eric. It was a real pleasure to talk to you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really

podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor. What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.