Finding My Blindspots, or the Painful Truth of Admitting My Own Biases

On Sunday afternoon, I received a text from an old friend.

What do you know about bias?

"Quite a bit," I responded, and then promptly sent over book recommendations. Then another text came through.

Can you be a panelist in a discussion about bias this afternoon?

"Sure, yeah, I'd be happy to do that," I texted back, and then I got to work, reminding myself of what I knew about biases. It turned out I had more homework to do than I expected.

A Walk, a Podcast, and a Gut Punch

My husband and I have two large dogs, Eleanor and Beatrice. As a good dog is generally a tired dog, that means I spend a lot of time out walking them. I love the solitude that comes with walking and thinking, and I also listen to podcasts and audiobooks along the way. It's a great way to take in information while getting some fresh air into me and the dogs.

On one of these walks, I listened to an interview with Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard social psychologist and co-author, with Anthony Greenwald, of the book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. Banaji and Greenwald, along with their colleague Brian Nosek, are the researchers behind the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, a tool that has been used online more than fourteen million times since it was introduced in 1998. The test measures how quickly we pair words like good or bad with different faces, and the gap in reaction time between pairings is read as a measure of unconscious bias.

In her book, Banaji describes having people play word-association games designed to surface their own biases. In one round, people use a keyboard to associate dark-skinned faces with words like evil, war, and deception, while light-skinned faces get paired with joy, love, and happiness. Then the pairings switch. The test times how long each round takes, and the difference between the two becomes a rough measure of unconscious bias. The results across millions of test takers are strikingly consistent: on the race version of the IAT, about 75 percent of people, including many people of color, show an implicit preference for white faces over black faces.

Malcolm Gladwell, yes, that Malcolm Gladwell of The Tipping Point and Blink and a permanent fixture on the New York Times bestseller list, wrote about taking the test himself. Gladwell, who has a Jamaican mother, was surprised and a little horrified to find that he, too, showed an unconscious preference for white faces over black faces.

I wasn't feeling great about my own results. I was in the Peace Corps. I travel. I've been to Robben Island. I am biased, too, far more than I’d like to admit.

Ugh.

Why We're Wired This Way

Here's the thing that made me feel a little less ashamed and a little more curious: bias isn't really a character flaw. It's closer to a design feature.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman describes two systems our minds use to process the world. System 1 is fast, automatic, and intuitive. It runs on instinct and pattern-matching, and it handles the vast majority of what we do all day without us ever noticing the effort. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and effortful. It's the part of us that sits down to do long division or weigh a hard decision, and frankly, it's lazy. Left to its own devices, System 2 tends to defer to whatever System 1 has already decided.

That handoff is efficient, but it's also where bias sneaks in. Kahneman describes shortcuts like the availability heuristic, where we judge how common or true something is by how easily examples come to mind, and confirmation bias, where we favor information that supports what we already believe. He also names WYSIATI, or "what you see is all there is," our tendency to build a confident story out of whatever limited information happens to be in front of us, without asking what we might be missing. None of this makes us bad people. It makes us people with brains built for speed over accuracy, brains that took every bit of cultural messaging we absorbed over a lifetime and quietly filed it away as fact.

Like any coach, I have some go-to questions. Here is one of mine:

What are you carrying that no one else can see?

In light of that panel discussion, writing this post, and a good deal of reflection, this question has changed for me. I used to ask it to bring something heavy into the light, a burden weighing a person down. Now there's a second layer to it: what am I carrying that I don't want others to see? What biases am I keeping secret, even from myself?

Just thinking about this brings me a good deal of humility. My own biases show up around education, literacy, social status, what people read, what they do for fun, where they grew up, how they spend their time, how they spend their money, and the list goes on. Going forward, that question of what am I carrying that no one else can see is one I'll both ask and hear differently, since every answer I get passes through the lens of my own biases first.

Bias Doesn't Stop at the Office Door

This isn't just personal work. It's leadership work, too, and the research on this is pretty consistent: leaders who don't examine their own blind spots tend to pass those blind spots down through their teams. Hiring decisions, performance reviews, and who gets stretch assignments are all places where unconscious bias quietly shapes outcomes, often while the leader making the call believes, sincerely, that they're being fair.

Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, has spent her career studying how leaders actually change and grow. In her book Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, she argues that most of us have it backward. We assume we need to think differently before we can act differently, that enough reflection will eventually produce a new mindset. Ibarra's research says the opposite is usually true. She calls it the outsight principle: we act our way into new ways of thinking, not the other way around. You don't reflect your way out of a blind spot. You take a new action, get new experience, talk to someone outside your usual circle, and the new thinking follows.

That's useful, because introspection alone won't surface most of our biases. By definition, a blind spot is something we can't see by looking harder in the same direction. Ibarra's advice to leaders, things like redefining the job, deliberately widening the network of people you learn from, and trying on unfamiliar ways of operating before you feel ready, is really advice about creating the conditions where your blind spots have a chance to become visible to you. It's the leadership version of taking the IAT: you have to do something different to find out what's actually there.

Questions to Ask to Bring Biases to Light

Let's face it, bias is everywhere. It's always been there. Our brains are lazy, always looking for the shortcut. But we can make it less prevalent. Having a few good questions on hand makes it easier to bring biases into the open, both our own and the ones we might be missing in a decision or a room. Here are questions that have worked well for me:

Who is watching us?
What is the example we're trying to set? (And if I were to Clean Language the question, “And what kind of example is that example?”)
What scares you about the "other"? What comes up for you when you think about "different"?
Who am I helping?
Who am I not helping?
What is the change I want to see?
What factors went into that decision?
Where do I need to look more closely?

Handling, Not Hiding

I'm human, fallible, and imperfect, and therefore I have biases. But how I handle, not carry, not hide, but handle, these biases is up to me. As I mull this over, I keep coming back to curiosity, to good questions, to starting with heart. I handle my biases by staying genuinely curious about the other person, by asking good questions that let them open up, and by rigorously examining what I am doing and why.

Social psychologist Amy Cuddy writes about something she calls social bravery, which she describes as the small, learnable, collective acts that break the silence, protect people's dignity, and make it safe to do the right thing. When I'm curious and willing to handle my biases instead of hiding them, that kind of bravery feels a little less like a leap and a lot more like a step worth taking.

References and Further Reading

Banaji, Mahzarin R., and Anthony G. Greenwald. Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. Delacorte Press, 2013.
Greenwald, Anthony G., Debbie E. McGhee, and Jordan L. K. Schwartz. "Measuring Individual Differences in Implicit Cognition: The Implicit Association Test." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 74, no. 6, 1998, pp. 1464-1480.
Project Implicit / Implicit Association Test: implicit.harvard.edu
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Gladwell, Malcolm. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Little, Brown and Company, 2005.
Ibarra, Herminia. Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader. Harvard Business Review Press, 2015.
Ibarra, Herminia. Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
Cuddy, Amy. "Calling All Bravehearts! What Is Social Bravery and How Will It Help Us Put an End to Workplace Bullying?" LinkedIn, linkedin.com/pulse/calling-all-bravehearts.