During my undergraduate studies, I was lucky enough to have an internship in Japan. It was an unforgettable time with many moving and special experiences. I went alone, didn’t speak a word of Japanese, lived with two Japanese students in a tiny house, got pushed into the subway every day with thousands of others, and worked at Japan’s largest company, NTT. Unfortunately, hardly anyone spoke any English at work that I understood anything about. Simple things turned into an adventure. I left Japan with a backpack full of admiration, respect and funny stories that I like to tell.
The Tall One and the Panda
Farewell Party, NTT Japan (1986)
One thing I haven’t talked about before is that I had a lot of trouble distinguishing all the people and colleagues I dealt with every day. I still feel very uncomfortable about that. It was just as if they were just sitting at their desks. But when I met them in the hallway or at lunch, it was impossible for me to recognize who was who. I confused the top boss with the male secretary and it was an embarrassing situation. I was really ashamed. Every day the inconvenience started that I couldn’t tell my 15 closest colleagues apart. From misery I taught myself a kind of survival technique and came up with a defining characteristic for everyone in the department that I could use to tell them apart: my boss was Babyface, my supervisor De Lange, the department secretary the Panda, the man from the other department who always The Professor was so kind. I also remember the Comb, the Laugh, the Little and the Divorce.
Princess Diana
In the early days I could just hold my own with this method. If I look at the photo from a long time ago, I can no longer imagine that I could not distinguish them. How could I not have seen the differences then? They are really all very different. Their face shapes, their height, their hair. What was wrong with me? And yet I think my Japanese colleague had the same problem. They all said that I was a lot like Princess Diana, the then crown princess of the UK. One evening when a Canadian lady I met told me that everyone in her organization thought she looked so much like Princess Diana too, something dawned on me. What was going on?
Same-race effect in the brain
Later when I started to deal with unconscious prejudices, I learned that what I had experienced in Japan is not very special. It can be explained from how our brain works and how it makes unconscious choices. It works like this: our brain looks for ways to make quick decisions. What we see in particular is very decisive for making decisions quickly. The eye scans the environment and looks at other people to gauge it quickly. Reading faces in particular is a mechanism for quickly identifying danger from friendship. That was already the case when our distant ancestors lived in itinerant tribes on the savanna and that is no different now. Our brain focuses on being able to accurately read and distinguish faces at a very young age. Which emotion do I see? What does this person want? Can this person be trusted? We learn to read faces and especially the faces we often see. Your brain develops an increasingly refined ability to see nuances and emotions in those faces. We immediately see fear, joy or annoyance in the faces of the people we interact with a lot. And that specialization comes at the expense of faces we don’t often see, for example someone with a different skin color. Actually, our brain does not know how to read those other faces and it is difficult to distinguish. All those faces look the same to your brain. And that was what I experienced in Japan. That’s why I struggled so much. In science, this phenomenon has been described as the same-race effect.
Large consequences
Stanford professor Jennifer Eberhardt also writes about this in a very educational book called Bias, the new Science of Race and Inequality (2019). She expertly shows how this same-race effect in your brain has major consequences in our actions today in organizations and in our society. This effect and not being able to distinguish well with people with other facial features, such as skin color, often leads to generalization of the group that you do not know well. You find them all similar and you give them all the same characteristics. Often negative features. Because you cannot properly estimate this group, you approach this group with a bit more distrust. This is also an unconscious automaticity of your brain. As a result, you can easily see the entire group as a category to which you assign many of the same properties. This is how unconscious prejudices form in your actions. And with unpleasant unconscious consequences. Also just in the Netherlands. Did you know that in the Netherlands today a white person with a criminal record is more likely to be invited for an interview than a black person who has never been in contact with the police (UvA, 2017)? Many people with a migration background still indicate that when they sit next to a woman in the tram, she often holds her bag a bit tighter. Unknown makes unloved in the brain. With major consequences.
Hold the thief!
It happens to everyone. Also Neil deGrasse Tyson, the world famous American astrophysicist and author. He noted that in stores, the security gates at the exit often went off suspiciously as he walked through them. Security guards immediately came to him and everything was checked. After several times, of course, nothing was found with him, he asked the guard if they could take a look at the surveillance images together. And what turned out? In the video you could see that while Neil deGrasse Tyson was going through the gates, a white-skinned thief was fleeing through the other gate next to him. Security guards immediately walked over to the black Neil deGrasse Tyson after the alarm signal and looked at all his bags and searched him. The white thief took advantage of the fact that not he but black Neil deGrasse Tyson was mistaken for the potential thief.
Painful for all of us
In the Netherlands, many people with a migration background experience daily disadvantage from the same-race effect. They are not seen by employers, are excessively stopped by the police and punished more harshly by judges for wrongdoing. That is extremely painful for the people involved and it is also painful for all of us. We do not treat people equally, often unconsciously. We may think we are not doing that, but the facts really show otherwise. Can we and do we just want to do better?
Recognition
Fortunately, we know better and better how to deal with this and how to counteract the unconscious categorizations in your brain. First of all, it requires recognition and acknowledgment that you may also be guilty of this and that you want to solve it. That is a big step. In a previous blog (“Pleasant self-image”) I explain in detail why this is a very big step for Dutch people, more so than for neighboring countries. If there is a willingness to actually do something about it, all that follows is the blood, sweat and tears😊 of every day trying to get better at this. We teach leaders – which is basically everyone – to act on a few principles.
1.Slow Down
Teach yourself to delay your decision on important decisions. Take another look at the facts, take another look at the process and wonder if you haven’t overlooked anything. Let others challenge you again. In Jennifer Eberhardt’s book, there is an example that police forces in the US are increasingly moving to apply this slow-down process to combat ethnic profiling. When an agent sees a suspicious person she / he wants to arrest, the procedure is increasingly focused on first describing the action that makes this person suspicious. Police officers are asked to consider that, for example, just being black is not a reason for arrest. This slow down procedure has proven to lead to fewer arrests of black people who have done nothing wrong, less frustration with these people, fewer incidents, but not fewer arrests of people who have really done something wrong.
2. Redesign your decision-making processes
Another way to manage your unconscious actions is to review your decision-making process. What you want is to make your most important decisions follow a fixed procedure that prevents your brain from walking the same hare paths too quickly. Use data and facts to see where unconscious biases have an impact on your decision making and fix it with a clear process measure. I would like to mention a few that we currently propose to many organizations:
- Standard check on choice of words, design and style of vacancy texts to be attractive to all talents in the target group. Many advertisements are often written for white men without people noticing.
- Structured interview questions to prevent bias from taking over in your questions.
- Proportional promotion per function layer.
- Equal pay for employees doing the same job.
3. Inclusion
Above all, make sure that people feel at home in a team and that they feel connected and free with the others in the team. Make sure people can and want to say what they want to say without feeling embarrassed or insecure. This requires attention from the team and especially from the leader. Research shows increasingly convincingly that all the activities and attention to really turn a group of people into a team pays for itself in the result of the team.
4. Growth mindset
You will make mistakes in your path to more diversity and inclusion. Things will go wrong unintentionally. Every mistake is an opportunity to learn from it and do better next time. That is the fastest way to learn. However, the more an organization expects you to do things flawlessly and predictably, the more perfectionistic you become, the more you color only within the lines and the more you detest your mistakes. Professor Carol Dweck calls this a fixed mindset as a counterpart to the growth mindset that learns from mistakes. The fixed mindset mechanism works against you on the challenging path for more diversity and inclusion. It really takes courage from you and your team to get out of such a vicious circle of fixed mindset and fear of mistakes.
The best team ever
In Japan I learned some important lessons. I subconsciously and incompetently applied all four methods that I describe above. But it was The Tall One and The Panda who made the breakthrough. They took me for lunch every day even though The Panda didn’t speak a word of English and I didn’t speak a word of Japanese. I learned from them, they enjoyed the things that had gone wrong again and that is how I learned to see the humor of it all. They improved their English and I learned some Japanese so that we could understand each other better and better. It was an unforgettable time. The Tall One, a very successful executive in Japan today, sometimes sends greetings from him and The Panda. We were the best team ever, the Tall One wrote recently. And that’s how I experienced it after the difficult start.
P.S.I met the Tall One, Manabu Moriya again in January 2020, when I did an assignment at Philips Japan. It was great meeting him again!