Hidden biases can be corrected by training attention, not by adjusting conditions

Evidence

There are potentially wider parallels to be made, since inattentional blindness is basically a form of visual bias, and something like inattentional blindness seems to be at work in broader forms of bias. In her Atlantic piece “Is This How Discrimination Ends?” the author Jessica Nordell takes part in a session of the Prejudice Lab, a project run by psychology professor Patricia Devine. As a graduate student, Devine had done experiments around the psychological aspects of implicit racial bias: “She demonstrated that even if people don’t believe racist stereotypes are true, those stereotypes, once absorbed, can influence people’s behavior without their awareness or intent.” The Prejudice Lab runs workshops at businesses and schools with the aim of showing people their own biases—in effect, to help learn how to see what they’re not seeing. … In the two-hour workshop that Nordell attended, Devine and her colleague Will Cox explained the science of bias, “barreled through mountains of evidence,” and invited students to share stories of how bias had played out in their own lives—stories none of them had a hard time coming up with. Nordell writes that while many other psychology experiments treat bias as a condition to be adjusted, Devine’s treats it as a behavior, aiming simply to “make unconscious patterns conscious and intentional.” In effect, the Prejudice Lab was the “attentional key” that brought racist thought and behavior to consciousness. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 394

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior material on Deep Listening — attention-training as a change mechanism — and to their broader interest in connection between perceptual and moral attention. — connects to: Attention disorders confer perceptual advantages that misaligned perspectives obscure in others — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 525; Anti-bias training works only when it solves frontline work problems — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 845; Retractions fail partly because the brain engages model-updating less when corrections challenge prior beliefs — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 279 (+2 more)