Take a hard look at your biases, as they cause suboptimal decisions and unhappiness, making it a self-interested endeavor.
Start tackling your own biases through self-reflection and introspection, observing your thoughts and patterns without immediately identifying with them.
Persist after making mistakes in addressing bias, allowing yourself to feel difficult emotions like shame or anger, then moving through them to acceptance and positive action.
Recognize that perpetuating bias harms you by creating disconnection, separation, and a distorted view of reality, leading to a lonely and disconnected experience.
Actively avoid denying others’ suffering or cultivating indifference to pain, as this can harden your heart and dehumanize yourself over time.
Confront the underlying feelings of horror and shame associated with bias and historical injustices to move through discomfort and take positive action.
Recognize that many of your thoughts, especially biased ones, are often cultural imprints rather than purely your own, which can reduce self-blame and allow for clearer examination.
Utilize loving-kindness meditation to foster self-compassion and reduce self-blame when you recognize unfair or ungrounded thoughts, making it easier to address them.
Leverage self-compassion not as an end in itself, but as a means to empower you to move towards connection, inclusivity, and fairness in your actions towards others.
Avoid believing you are objective or immune to bias, as this can increase your trust in your own biases and prevent you from addressing them.
Do not adopt a “colorblind” or “genderblind” approach, as studies show this can lead to increased detection of bias and feelings of discrimination by marginalized groups.
Seek out training or resources that boost your awareness of how bias works and its impact, and increase your motivation to change, as this is a key component in altering behavior.
Implement replacement strategies for biased thoughts, such as actively looking for alternative explanations for someone’s behavior instead of relying on assumptions.
Practice mindfulness and various forms of meditation to improve emotional regulation, reduce stress, and potentially erode the distinction between self and other, fostering altruistic responses.
Engage in loving-kindness meditation to potentially reduce the strong distinction between self and other, fostering a sense of connection and similar responses to both.
Actively work to reduce stress, cognitive load, and emotional dysregulation in your life, as these factors exacerbate bias.
Intentionally seek and cultivate meaningful relationships with people from different social groups, being aware of your tendency towards “homophily” (love of the same).
Participate in cooperative activities with people from different backgrounds where everyone has equal status and works towards a common goal, as this effectively reduces prejudice.
Study history, particularly the origins of racism and patriarchy, to understand how present-day biases are a legacy of cultural inventions, which can help you see them more clearly and diminish their grip.
Be aware that stereotyping can be an addictive intermittent reward cycle, making it hard to break due to the brain’s reward system for confirmed predictions.
Recognize that bias is an interactive dynamic, where your treatment of others affects their response and yours, leading to complex interactions.
For organizations, analyze existing policies and practices to identify where bias is showing up, rather than just asking if the organization is biased.
Organizations should develop structured, consistent, and transparent criteria for decision-making before evaluating candidates, to formally reduce the influence of bias.
Organizations must clearly define their fundamental motivation for pursuing an unbiased and inclusive workplace, understanding what they hope to achieve.
For organizations, frame diversity as essential to the fundamental functioning and future of the company, viewing diverse perspectives as a source of wealth and essential resources for better performance.
Organizations should actively foster psychological safety within teams, ensuring everyone feels safe to speak up and learn from one another, as this is crucial for diversity to translate into better performance.