While we might enjoy an early morning shell hunt on the beach, boogie boarding in the salty surf, even snorkeling off the coast for a glimpse at a school of fish below the surface, few of us will ever get far beyond the ocean’s shore. Our understanding of the ocean is mostly limited to beach vacations and biology classes.
Supported by decades of deep-sea exploration, oceanographer Sylvia Earle shares her knowledge of the oceanic depths and their impact on us land-dwellers. She’s spent years under the surface, miles down, swimming with silvery eels, getting to know the bottom-dwellers and lurking giants. It’s this other world, this below-the-surface stuff that Sylvia insists profoundly impacts our daily existence.
In the same way most of us only scratch the surface with our ocean-encounters, we’re often only familiar with the most blatant, surface-type discrimination. You know, those really obvious racial slurs and crude jokes. But it’s the miles of discrimination off-the-coast and under-the-surface of our awareness that make up most of discrimination.
According to social-psychologists, we’re often pretty clueless about our own biases. Not all unconscious biases are bad; in fact, we need these gut reactions to survive. For example, if someone’s hair is on fire, we don’t stand there wondering about the flames; we’ve learned that fire is harmful, so we help snuff it out. Our previous experiences have molded our brain so that we can make such split-second decisions.
We rely on these cognitive shortcuts to help us navigate our world. But our snap decisions can get us in trouble when we apply them to people, resulting in unintentional intolerance and discriminatory behavior.
The harmful unconscious biases we have about people often come from incomplete, inaccurate, or biased portrayals of minority groups in our constant stream of media. In fact, social-psychologists note that kids display deeply entrenched stereotypes of blacks, women, and other social groups before age five. Even before they have the cognitive capability to form and articulate their own beliefs, kids are bombarded with bias through peer pressure, mass media, and societal structures.
Research suggests that repeated associations in the conscious mind eventually become unconscious, so an endless stream of biased associations from a variety of outlets easily seeps into our awareness at an early age and inevitably persists into adulthood (unless consciously challenged). No matter how good our intentions are to be fair or unbiased, these multiple biased messages and impressions get in the way.
Being aware of what is under the surface of your awareness–your unconscious biases–is the first step toward combating years of ingrained prejudices. In fact, some social-psychologists say that the best way to rewrite these inaccurate cognitive shortcuts is to be more mindful of them.
What biases or assumptions might be lurking outside your awareness? Become a deep-sea diver.
Think About It
1) Go deeper. Analyze your favorite sitcom or talk show–what unconscious biases and stereotypes are in the screenplay? How do these associations inform how you view yourself, others, and the world around you?
2) What unconscious biases might be serving as barriers to some in your organization? Be mindful of clues to unintentional intolerance. Is there disproportionately high turnover rate among a particular social group? What steps is your organization taking to identify instances of unintentional intolerance?
Practions (Practice + Actions)
1) If meeting agendas, project briefs, company policies, or e-mails about open supervisor positions are always written with a masculine pronoun (“he”), change the language to include both genders.
2) Research a social/ethnic group or environment that you don’t know much about. Accumulating more complete, accurate knowledge about a particular group or issue will help you better discern inaccurate portrayals or unfair associations of them (whether in the media, office, peer group, or your own experience).
Tags: Bottom Dwellers, Discriminatory Behavior, Gut Reactions, Land Dwellers, Portrayals, Snap Decisions, Social Groups, Social Psychologists, Surface Type, Unconscious Biases
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