Guilt “Tripping”: A Sure-Fire Way to Sabotage Your Bias-Reduction Efforts

It’s hard to accept when we encounter colleagues who voice biased attitudes and demonstrate biased behaviors. Those observations inspire anger, hurt feelings, and even a desire to punish. It is one of the most painful of those punishments – making someone feel guilty for what they said or did or thought – that is the subject of this short essay.

The Bottom Line: Punishment and guilt do not work to change most things. They rarely work to change behaviors and are even less likely to defeat unconscious bias.

Guilt is, in short, a feeble weapon against bias. It is feeble because, when we feel guilty, we almost instantly become defensive. All we can think about is how to make this awful feeling of guilt and embarrassment go away.

So, what does that defensiveness look like? It means to preoccupy our thinking – not with exploring the question of if we really have biases – but with reasons why we are in fact innocent.

Here are three techniques that, I believe, are more apt to result in genuine introspection and possibly even change:

Engage the person in a two-way dialogue about what has been said or done. No lecturing, no scolding, just a person to person conversation.
Listen, listen, listen. Nothing is more powerful to motivate change than to feel truly heard. That feeling has a way of calming tension and opening the mind to new perspectives.
Employ logic. If, for example, someone voices a bias (an “inflexible generality”) about a group, ask them questions like
- Where did you learn that that was the case? Was it a reliable source?
- How many people do you really know — not just heard a rumor about — who conform to that characteristic?
- How many do you know who do not conform?

Two- way conversation – give it a try; you might just be amazed at what you learn.

The material in this post reflects the ideas expressed in Dr. Thiederman’s book 3 Keys to Defeating Unconscious Bias and in the training videos Defeating Unconscious Bias: 5 Strategies and Gateways to Inclusion: Turning Tense Moments into Productive Conversations.

Sondra Thiederman can be contacted for virtual facilitation, and panel participation by clicking here or calling 619-583-4478. For additional information, go to this link to learn more about what Dr. Thiederman has to offer.

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