Sunday 14 October 2012

Uncover Hidden Bias and Attitudes

Implicit Association Test - Screen for bias or attitudes?

We are all a little or more than a little biased. Don’t feel bad about this. The ability to quickly tell a friend from foe helped early humans survive, being able to quickly catergorise people is a good thing in that respect. The downside is that this is also the foundation of stereotypes, prejudice and, ultimately, discrimination.It can affect how we treat and work with people.

We can be consciously committed to social equality, and deliberately work to behave without prejudgment, yet still possess hidden negative biases or stereotypes. What relevance has this to the workplace? If you have a company that has customers from a particular group, for example, elderly or mainly female, then these groups could be treated differently by staff members carrying this latent but present prejudice to that social group

Why it’s important

Many studies show a link between hidden biases and actual behavior. Hidden biases reveal themselves in how we interact with the world at large and the work place is no exception.
Studies have shown that school teachers inadvertently or otherwise show prejudices in the classroom. Some researchers believe children of color and white children in the same classroom effectively receive different educations. The same could be true in internal meetings, customer service or when forming project teams.

A now classic experiment showed that white interviewers sat farther away from black applicants than from white applicants, made more speech errors and ended the interviews 25% sooner. Such discrimination has been shown to diminish the performance of anyone treated that way, whether black or white.

"Implicit Association Tests" (IATs) can shine a light on these hidden, or automatic, stereotypes. They go way beyond race and gender, indeed Project Implicit — a collaborative research effort between researchers at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and University of Washington shows many examples of tests for different associations and biases.

How it works

The implicit association test is often associated with Greenwald (Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz, 1998), and is used to measure personality or prejudices while ensuring that participants are oblivious to the purpose of this procedure.

Say you are testing for diligence. You would ask a person to hit a key on a keyboard when a word comes up that relates to them e.g, their gender, age, star sign etc and the same key when a word relating to diligence comes up e.g. meticulous. You would also ask them to hit a different key when a word comes up that is not about them and when a word that does not relate to diligence comes up e.g. lazy. Diligent people complete this task quickly with few errors


You could swap the keys and have the same key relating to the self and negative behaviour. People who are not very diligent would perform well on this test. The difference between the two tests would rate the persons level of diligence (Steffens, 2004).


How you can use it
  You could use this to build a test for diligence as part of induction training or recruitment. You could also create a test to investigate attitudes to, for example, older people if you ran a residential care facility, attitudes to race if your employees or customers would belong to that particular group. These tests are more difficult to counter and may be more reliable than asking new recruits to say what their thoughts on old people, racial groups are.

You could rate peoples attitude to particular project (have a key to press for project terms and positive thoughts, a key for non-project terms and negative thoughts, then swap). This could be ran over the life span of a project to get some ones attitude to the project, feelings it will succeed or fail. Getting back to diligence, you could periodically test staff to see if scores are dipping and intervene with work place changes or motivational improvements.

If your company was bought out, before and after the buy out have a test with a key to press for company terms and positive words, a key to press for non company terms and negative words, then swap. You would get an indication of workers change in attitude to their new conditions and owners. Get the picture?

It could be cross validated with some other tests, performance results, interview questions or observations of performance but is a good starting point.

This is a Test Post

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