Jessica Nordell: Interrupting Our Biases
Jessica Nordell is the award-winning science writer behind The End of Bias: A Beginning, which was the culmination of fifteen years of reporting on implicit bias and discrimination in all facets of life. As a frequent contributor to The New York Times, the Atlantic, and the New Republic, Jessica goes beyond delineating all the ways in which our minds unconsciously and automatically filter the world—in ways that are harmful to ourselves and others—to uncover successful interventions. She details, in a stunning way, people, companies, and cultures that have managed to undo unconscious bias, and build something more true and beautiful in its place, whether it’s the way schools assess gifted students, how policing is done, or undoing the long-term and insidious effects of gender discrimination in the workplace. Jessica has a degree in physics from Harvard and a degree in poetry from the University of Wisconsin, which underlines the rarity of her mind and her ability to perceive nuance and complexity: Her book is one that promises healing, and I recommend it to everyone. Meanwhile, this is a fun fact: Jessica is a direct descendant of the last woman to be tried for witchcraft in the state of Massachusetts. I’d be happy to be in her coven, any day.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
We are beholden to our unexamined patterns…
Bias, a habit to be interrupted…
Ending our notion of out-group homogeneity…
The space between categorization and evaluation…
MORE FROM JESSICA NORDELL:
The End of Bias: A Beginning: The Science and Practice of Overcoming Unconscious Bias
Explore more of Jessica's writing on unconscious and implicit bias
Subscribe to Jessica's newsletter - Who We Are To Each Other
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN:
Congratulations on your beautiful, incredibly well-researched book working on my own book. I have either book envy or book judgment, you know, where I'm or where I'm like, oh, this person needed a better editor, but like your book is perfect. Congratulations.
JESSICA NORDELL:
Thank you so much. I'm very honored. I hear you when I was working on my book too, like I would just devour other books and try to understand how they were put together and who helped them. Is your book fiction or nonfiction?
ELISE:
It's nonfiction. It'll be out next year. It's interesting at the very end, when you were talking about the patriarchy as sort of something that you had sort of assumed as eternal and pre-existent versus something that's that evolved over time and i's invisibility. So my book is about women and the patriarchy and the Seven Deadly Sins and the way those have been acculturated, regardless of our religious beliefs into our idea of goodness and behavior. And so when I was running through them, you know, greed, lust, gluttony, anger, pride, like all the ways in which women self-restrict and patrol our own behavior and the behavior of other women. I don't know how long it took you to write this book. It can't have been a minute. So it's been a long process. I'm just doing my final revisions and cutting. It's hard. Each chapter could be its own book.
JESSICA:
Oh, a hundred percent. And also don't you feel like you are also kind of writing yourself while you're writing a book, and you’re this different person. I mean, my I've spent about six years, five and a half, six years on my book and now I'm like, wow, if I were to write it now, I would've like approached it in the way as the person I am now as a result of having written this book, you know?
ELISE:
Oh, no, it completely has transformed me. Writing has been interesting as I myself have become aware of the, I mean, you talk a lot about sort of the way that your own bias has emerged. Which I thought was lovely to have that self-revelation and yeah, mine has been like therapy, with a lot of visitation of old traumas and it has some memoir in it. I have a little bit more memoir than you do, but yeah, it's been a ride.
JESSICA:
Well, especially, I feel like just as a woman in this society grappling with the vastness of the patriarchy and the way it has affected every aspect of our life from birth is yeah, overwhelming. And I think it's hard to see unless you're really, really digging into it the way, you know, the way it sounds like you are and the, the way that I had to do too for my book.
ELISE:
Well, it's such a boogeyman too, because it's like, who, what, where, like, and then you can see all these examples. I mean, it's not dissimilar to thinking about bias where there are all these other examples that disprove its permanence in reality. And so somehow even convincing people that it's now it's much easier with Roe and everything that's happening. It's like, hello? But it's so easy for people to point to gains or other variations of equality and be like, this isn't a problem anymore. Or we’re in a post-patriarchal age, and it's like, no, no, this is deep. This is baked into who we are. These are the stories that our entire second nature formed in this culture. And even people who are aware of it still behave. And I behave in completely patriarchal ways.
JESSICA:
That was my experience of really having to sit with my own biases and see the way that I was expressing biases even against myself, even against other women. It was very alarming and humbling to see how deeply it penetrates, like all of our interactions.
ELISE:
And it's really interesting too, because, you know, turning to The End of Bias, this aversion that we have for acknowledging or recognizing our own biases in part, because I can't remember who you were quoting, who was talking about sort of the white-ism of that. But I think it's a very female instinct to be like, but I'm a good person. It's like, we cling that goodness, that desire to help and fix. And it is so freaky to recognize that despite your best intentions, or your quote unquote moral code, it's part of life to behave in ways that are harmful to other people. And putting that down that like belief in goodness or clinging to that idea of goodness is so hard. And yet where did those ideas of goodness even come from?
JESSICA:
It's so hard. I mean, I think that one of the hardest parts about entering into the work of tackling one's own bias is the fact that it is so painful to see the ways that one is harming others without realizing it. But I feel like there there's a silver lining to it, too, which is that once you start to see it, like once I started to see the ways that I was reacting in biased ways toward women, toward people of color, toward all the stigmatized groups in our society that we learned biases about, once I started to see it, it was like the first step of agency. It was like stepping into freedom, because when you see it, then you can actually do something about it. And before you see it, you're just sort of beholden, you know, to these unexamined patterns and you don't even know you're doing them. So you're not free at all, is what I found.
ELISE:
Where it's interesting, like in terms of bias too, it's not only against marginalized people, but I also loved the wide breadth of examples and communities that you explore, particularly when you were talking about Watts and policing, too, because I have a lot of bias against police officers. I have a lot of bias against white men who look a certain way. And again, we can argue, like, they're not the ones necessarily who need my protection or my himpathy, to quote Kate Manne, but it's true. Like it cuts in all directions. So I think for anyone who's sort of allergic to this conversation or feels like they're tired of it. It applies to everyone that we encounter in our lives really.
JESSICA:
The basic mechanism of bias applies to every category of person that we encounter. We grow up in a culture. We learn that certain categories are salient in that culture because of our experiences. And then we store associations and stereotypes about those groups in our memory. And then when we encounter a person in one of those groups that we realize is part of a category that we know, then all of those associations and stereotypes and beliefs and memories start to come into play and start to affect the way that we interact with a person. And so the way I've sort of come to think about it is that so much of the time, we are not even interacting with a person, we're interacting with a daydream, or a hallucination. And not an actual individual.
ELISE:
You had this beautiful way of distilling it where you talk about how it's habit, right? Like you're exercising a habit the way that we would drive somewhere and not really be conscious. Everyone has that experience of suddenly you're at work and you're like, I don't even remember getting in the car. And yet you were driving a massive vehicle at high speeds. So that’s auto the way that we auto engage with life and shortcut decision making without even being aware of what we're doing. Right. Right. It's letting our, the pattern forming parts of our brains run our lives.
JESSICA:
Right. Right. Which is one of the reasons that when I was looking into approaches to interrupt this habit, like the reason that I wrote the book was I really had this question: What do we do about this problem of bias and discrimination? And what you're describing is one of the reasons that mindful self-awareness can be helpful in interrupting the pattern, because instead of just operating on autopilot, it allows us to start to see what's happening in our own minds while it's happening. And then when you start to see it, then you can make a new decision, you know, you can decide to do something different.
ELISE:
The one who was running workshops, I wanna say her name was like Deanna?
JESSICA:
Trish Devine.
ELISE:
So she was the loving meditation process where it was actually making, the way she would gently coach people, because there's a lot of a new research, I was talking about this with Celeste Headlee, actually, about how people who voted for Obama than go on to exhibit more biased and more racist behavior in part, because like in our aspiration to be good and to check things off the list, we are like, oh, I could never be racist because I have these values. And by having these values, I'm done. Like, I'm good. And so confronting people about that is very tricky and typical work. Can you take us through her workshop process because she really does it quite artfully?
JESSICA:
Yeah. So there are a lot of different approaches that have been shown to change people's behavior in measurable ways so that they act in more fair and just ways and less discriminatory ways. And one of them is this approach that was developed at the University of Wisconsin, which basically looks at bias as a habit that needs to be interrupted. And so the approach that they've developed is based on Cognitive Behavior Therapy. It has the components of CBT, which are awarenes, developing that there's awareness of a problem, motivation, developing the kind of hutzpah or the motivation to actually do something about it. And then being given strategies to replace that behavior with something different. And so in the workshop that she and her team have developed, they take people through all of those different phases and are careful to balance on one hand saying that, you know, unintentional or unconscious or unexamined bias is something that's very common, and you have to be quite vigilant about it, because it's so common and we all are susceptible to expressing it. And on the other hand, it's not okay, like it's normal, but it's also something that we have the responsibility to interrupt. And so they take people through these stages while also continually reinforcing that it's both normal, and also that you have the power and the responsibility to do something different.
ELISE:
And we need approaches like this. I mean, I recognize the reason that you wrote this book is partly because, DEI initiatives and a lot of our efforts to quote unquote solve this problem of implicit bias—i doesn't work, right? Like most of these initiatives not only fail, but can actually have deleterious or negative effects.
JESSICA:
Well, one of the big challenges is that a lot of the approaches that have been designed to interrupt bias, like in the workplace, haven't actually been tested or evaluated. So we don't even necessarily know how they're doing. I mean, frequently, a workplace will bring in a consultant or a workshop to try to address these issues, but they won't necessarily set goals or some sort of target for even seeing whether it's making a difference toward those goals. So they could be making things better. They could be making things worse. They could be having no effect in a lot of cases. We just don't know which it is, which is a real problem. I mean, there's a psychologist whose work I think is fantastic named Betsy Levy Paluck at Princeton. And she has come out strongly saying that any anti-prejudice intervention needs to be evaluated on the level of a medical intervention. Like the stakes are so high and the consequences are so serious that if we just kind of sprinkle these around without actually knowing what they're doing, it can be really dangerous.
ELISE:
And a lot of DEI efforts, while noble…but to increase diversity, be inclusive, rewrite standards of companies so that the workforce resembles the world around us. Like as well-intended, as those often are without actual work of understanding why or integrating opinions or changing culture it ends up becoming sort of like an armor, right. An armor against criticism. And yet like, teflon, like nothing sticks. It doesn't stay and cultures don't necessarily change again. I'm sure the data is lacking, but it feels like that seems to be just anecdotally from talking to people, it seems to be the case, no one wants to fill a quota. They wanna be valued. They wanna be seen, they wanna be included.
JESSICA:
And I mean, you know, when I was doing the research, I found that the companies that had the most success in actually making a real difference in terms of inclusion and diversity were companies that understood that a diverse company is, was essential to the functioning and future of the organization. You know, it wasn't like a something that they were doing because, you know, to fit, to, to check sort of a legal check box, or even because they felt like it was something that was nice to do, but it was something that they felt was actually core to their functioning and their future and that they really needed those diverse perspectives and skills, and opinions, and backgrounds in order to function. And so I think, you know, if organizations haven't made that step, haven't really understood that as part of their future and part of their success, then some of these efforts become kind of, you know, almost cosmetic efforts or kind of bandaid efforts that don't actually result in real change. Like you said.
ELISE:
And part of it seems to be this acknowledgement. I don't remember this person who quote Cox's first name, but we can't change people's values, but we can give people knowledge about how they might not be living up to their values. Once you have this information, you can't help but make an effort. So it's also why it's so critical for people to actually understand the ways in which they're maybe exhibiting biased behavior as we all do. But more as a gap between who we say we are and how we're actually showing up in the world. And it seems like if people aren't really actually ready to grapple with that change is hard.
JESSICA:
Yes, yes. And values affirmation exercises can be helpful too. Like one intervention that I just find so fascinating and powerful was a school based intervention done by a psychologist named Jason Okonofua and he had this really important insight, which is that there are ways to interrupt bias that don't rely on actually changing people's biases, but instead target people's goals and values and allow those to become kind of allow those to supersede their bias behavior. So if I can just tell you about his approach. I think it's amazing.
So he was very concerned, as an education disparities researcher in disparate rates of suspension of African American and Latino students in schools. And so he was trying to figure out how to reduce the disparities in suspension. And he developed this really interesting approach. So he recruited middle school math teachers, and he told the math teachers that they were going to be participating in a workshop and training to basically review common sense best practices in teaching. But what he was actually doing was bringing the teachers through kind of a learning journey and having them recommit to their values of empathy and respect and avoiding labeling students.
And he had teachers do things like read students' perspectives of times when they felt really respected by a teacher. And he had them do things like reflect on ways that they would try to promote respect between themselves and students and express empathy towards students, and really trying to think about students' perspectives when they were misbehaving. And so he wasn't actually addressing teacher's biases at all. He didn't even talk about biases, but instead he talked about things like respect and empathy and trust and understanding, and really tried to kind of build those up. And what he found was that over the following year suspensions were cut in half and suspensions of black and Latino students in particular dropped precipitously. Students also said they felt more respected by teachers at the end of this intervention. And so I thought that was just such an interesting approach because he wasn't, he wasn't telling teachers that they were biased and they needed to change their biases. He was telling them, look, you care about students. You, you want to have respectful, trusting relationships with students. You wanna build really positive environments, and this is how you can do it. And that allowed teachers to kind of override in a sense their, the biases that they might have been expressing otherwise.
ELISE:
It was him as well, where he did that experiment with probation and parole officers. That led to a reduction in recidivism, they were shown officers were shown the inconsistency of viewing themselves as individuals within their group of officers while seeing parolees as indistinct from one another. So I loved that too, just that breaking apart, these groups is often enough for people to start to see individual differences. And that in of itself requires more thinking, right? Like that breaks the habit of grouping and automatically applying stereotypical points of view.
JESSICA:
Yes. One, one of the most powerful approaches to reducing bias is to increase the complexity with which we see other groups. So we all have this tendency toward outgroup homogeneity, which is kind of a technical term, meaning that when we don't belong to a group, we tend to see all the members as being somewhat similar to one another. But we see our own group as really diverse and complex. So all different approaches that can help make us see that other group as just as complex as our own group is really helpful because it's a lot harder to stereotype a group. If you see that group as actually all made up of members who are all very different from one another, which is of course the truth.
ELISE:
Yeah. I loved that poster project. Can you talk a little bit about that? Cause I thought that was stunningly obvious and brilliant.
JESSICA:
I love the poster project, too. I'm glad you brought it up. So this was a really interesting intervention done in France, by a French researcher of North African origin and an American researcher. And they were looking specifically at anti-Arab prejudice in France. France is a country that struggles a lot with anti-Arab prejudice. And so they were trying to see whether representing people of Arab origin in different ways might decrease the bias against them. And so they developed an approach where they created a poster and on the poster, there were images of all of these different people of Arab origin with there was a photo and then a name and then some kind of description of that person. So it might say, you know, Mina age 32, optimistic, or an age, 55, stingy. And there was a combination of positive and negative traits, like happy, generous, outgoing. And then there were things like, critical, rude, things that were like more negative.
So what they did was they put these posters up in a lot of different locations and exposed people in physical therapy offices, and high schools, and universities to these posters showing people of Arab origin who were very different from one another. And then after people were exposed to the poster for a while, they went back to those locations and they tested to see whether people were going to behave differently toward people of Arab origin. So for instance, in the physical therapy office, they brought in a Confederate of the researchers who was a person of Arab origin and had them sit in the waiting room. And then they measured how near or far patients were sitting compared to that person. It's called a seating distance evaluation. They did an evaluation where they had someone of Arab origin drop a bag and spill the contents of her purse all over the floor.
And then they measured to see whether the people who had seen this poster would help her pick up her things or not. And what they found was that exposure to the poster made a really big difference. It made people treat people of Arab origin significantly more humanely, more fairly, more kindly. And that poster had a much bigger impact than a poster that showed the same folks, but all with positive characteristics. So the takeaway is that what's actually important is not seeing a group necessarily as all fabulous, wonderful people, because that's not reality, but seeing that group as just as complex, just as diverse, just as different from one another as one's own group.
ELISE:
I loved it. And I loved the fact that they also tested sort of the complete positive assignations because, even when you hear that, you sort of buck against that, like stop trying to completely change my opinion or gaslight me about the reality of humanity, which is that people are nuanced and ranged along the spectrum of behaviors, and we're all capable of being wonderful and terrible often in the same day. So I love that, and not to keep putting you on the spot, but there were so many amazing stories. Can you talk about sort of these, because the solutions that are systems-based right. Where there's just a massive change to how things are done are in many ways thrilling, because then we're not less reliant. Not that we don't all need to do this deep personal work, but as we start to engineer systems to get bias out of them, there's just more efficiency obviously. Can you talk about the gifted school program and how that changed so dramatically demographically once they started testing all kids for giftedness, rather than selecting those that they perceived to be gifted, who were unsurprisingly predominantly male and white.
JESSICA:
And wealthy.
Yes. So this was an intervention that happened in Broward County, Florida. This is in the early 2000’s. There was a school staff administrator for the Broward County schools who took a look at the data and saw something that really alarmed her about the gifted and talented programs. Particularly she saw that the vast majority of students who'd been designated gifted and talented, lived in the wealthiest parts of the county and were predominantly white and wealthy students. There were schools in predominantly lower income and Black and brown neighborhoods where there were no gifted identified students at all. And this was really alarming to her because she had been a gifted educator herself, and understood that some students really need particular kinds of attention in order to thrive, in order to do well in school, in order to move forward with their lives.
So at that time, the way students would be identified as quote unquote gifted through being referred to a school psychologist by either a parent or a teacher. So the process depended on someone in that student's life looking at that student and saying, you know what, I think we're gonna tap you on the shoulder. We're gonna see if you might fit into this program. And so what this administrator persuaded the county to do was instead of relying on that kind of adult judgment to instead screen all the children, every single child in the entire school district. I think it was, I can't remember if it was second grade or fourth grade, I think second grade. And so they undertook this massive project to screen every single child.
They had to hire a ton of extra staff. They had to hand deliver notes in multiple languages to parents to explain to parents what was going on with their children. So when they finished the universal screening process, the number of Black and Hispanic kids who qualified as gifted tripled, and of the hundreds of additional kids who qualified over the next year, 80% were low income or from English language learning backgrounds. And what they also found was that a lot of these kids actually had scores on the screening exam that were significantly above the cutoff. So they were considered highly gifted and they had not been identified. And so what this, you know, what this approach really uncovered, I think is that it wasn't that these kids weren't capable or didn’t have what they needed to be in these programs, but no one had identified them. No one had thought to find out if they had or not. But the other thing, you know, one thing that's kind of interesting about a lot of these interventions is that sometimes they have like unintended consequences. And so one of the unintended consequences of this intervention is that not only were more Black and Hispanic kids and low income and ELL kids identified as gifted, but more white kids were identified as special Ed. And the entire distribution of the scores shifted because before white or wealthier kids were being under-evaluated for special ed status, and they were overrepresented in the gifted program compared to other kids.
So no one was winning. And I think too girls started it actually overrepresenting boys in the gifted program.
ELISE
Girls have been outperforming boys in school for centuries. And I love that intervention and in part, just because it it's so important for kids, right. Just being told that you have something special is an incredible boost for kids, right? Like that has real impact in how they just being identified or bolstered in any way can dramatically impact their lives.
JESSICA:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is a famous study from the ‘60s that looked at classrooms where teachers were told that some students were high-achieving students and other students were not labeled as high-achieving students. In reality, the labels were random. So there was no difference between these students, but the students who'd been labeled high achieving later scored higher on standardized tests. And the thinking is that because, you know, the students and the teachers thought that there was something special about these students, they actually lived into that and actually like flourished more. To your point, labels are powerful.
ELISE:
Yeah. And, in the reverse, right, because then you also talk about those stunning studies with kids where they reinforce gender aggressively, and are constantly reminding children that they're a girl or a boy, and that has negative effects, or they assign them to completely arbitrary blue shirt, yellow shirt groups, and then watch Lord of the Flies unfold like it has, I mean, kids are fascinating test case for how these things start to infiltrate and infect our minds.
They just start behaving in aggressive and biased and not kind ways towards groups that they perceive or told more importantly are told, are inferior. Is that sort of the nut of that particular study?
JESSICA:
So I think you're talking about the research by Becky Bigler, who's a child developmental psychologist who was really trying to understand how prejudice emerges in children. She did a whole program of research where she worked in schools with young kids and manipulated the environment that they were in, in different ways to see what effect it would have on their gender stereotyping or other kinds of stereotyping. Ee could have a whole conversation about the ethics…
ELISE:
Not ethical, but yeah.
JESSICA:
And she did run into ethics issues with her work. But she revealed really interesting things. I mean, some of the most powerful work she did looked at the effect of labeling groups. And so she would do things like she would go into a school and with one set of classrooms, she would have the teachers constantly label the students like, hello boys and girls, girls line up over here, boys line up over here. She would separate them by gender. She would have all of the girls artwork put up on one bulletin board and boys' artwork put up on another bulletin board. And that would be like one set of classrooms. And then the other set of classrooms, she would have teachers just act normal, not label the students, particularly, and in a whole series of studies she did about labeling.
She found that this labeling itself reinforced the categories that children belong to increases stereotyping tremendously and increases the kind of discriminatory way that they behave toward one another. So it raises some really interesting questions about how we should interact as a society. Her work suggests that the more we reinforce the categories that we belong to, the more stereotyping and discrimination results. On the other hand, we live in a world where there are categories and we can't ignore them. And that has its own negative consequences. So this is a real tension, I think. in dealing with these issues. It's a tension that I ran into a lot.
ELISE:
And that goes to this idea of people who are like “I'm colorblind” and you're like, well, that's insane. Like the whole point is that we're different and we need to explore those differences. And that it's the attachment of value to those differences that informs our behavior. This is better than that, or this is that, et cetera. But to ignore, I think it was Devine. She said, you write, “Trying to deny these differences, Devine asserts, makes discrimination worse. Perceiving distinctions is something humans naturally do. Humans after all see age and gender and skin color. That's vision. Humans have associations about these categories. That's culture. Using these associations to then make judgements about an individual. That Devine believes, is habit. It's not seeing difference that matters. It's reacting to difference in harmful ways.” I thought that was such a beautiful distillation, and yet people get so allergic to the conversation that they trip. At the first point, and then deny and pretendlike have a different set of eyes.
JESSICA:
I mean, the idea that we're colorblind or gender blind or age blind or something is ridiculous. I mean, we categorize those things within milliseconds, right. When we see one another, it's part of our development of our visual processing and our social development. But it's a deep and challenging problem. Like how we actually, how we create space between the categorization of one another and the evaluation of one another. I think creating that space is what allows us to open the door to a new way of interacting in a more humane way.
ELISE:
I wanna talk about police and Watts, but really quickly the end of the book, when you explore the changing of norms and standards and how can we talk about that quickly, because it's obviously sort of the world that we're living in, in a dramatic way. You use not incredibly charged examples of how, when we perceive that other people think that doing something is right or normal, we're much more inclined to do it. And that obviously there are negative examples of that all over the place culturally, but you talk about it in the context of like re-using towels and hotels. So can you talk a little bit about norms and then how that either enforces our bias or disrupts it?
JESSICA:
Absolutely. I think social norms are one of the most powerful ways of influencing human behavior and we see it happening all the time. And I don't know if bringing politics in is like too much, but the idea of social norms is that we are tremendously influenced by what we see other people doing and what we believe to be popular among others. So if we think that a particular action is really common and that the most popular people are doing it, we're much more likely to do it. This has been shown in like countless studies, like the hotel room studies. So there were studies that looked at whether people would be willing to forego having their towels washed very regularly. And they had in some of the hotel rooms, they put placards in that said, some of the guests saw placard that said, you know, we want you to reuse your towel because it's important for the environment. Others saw a sign that said a placard that said the majority of hotel guests reuse their towels. And the ones who saw the placard that said a majority of other guests are doing this were much more likely to do it. Similarly, there was research that took place in the petrified forest, the petrified national forest that looked at what might persuade people to not take pieces of petrified wood from the forest. Some people were told that it was important to preserve the sanctity of the forest. And so you shouldn't steal from the forest. And others were told that many people steal from the forest and, and it's really bad that they do that. And the visitors who were told that a lot of people do this bad thing were more likely to do the bad thing themselves. So even if you're told something is bad, if you think a lot of other people are doing it, you're more likely to do it.
And, you know, I think honestly, you know, during the lead up to the 2016 election, when I saw newspapers and networks show these enormous rallies that Trump was holding, I knew in that moment that they were creating social norms and they were through through showing these visuals of Trump at a huge rally with lots and lots of supporters, they were creating the perception that supporting Trump is a popular and normal thing to do. And I think often the media doesn't even realize their role in the creation of social norms, but it's incredibly important because it influences people's behavior profoundly.
ELISE:
No, certainly, I think so many people took sort of part in that or suddenly, and we saw this obviously, I don't know if we've ever seen social norm shift as much as they have in the last six years. I can't believe that we're having conversations about how normal white supremacy is, or the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers, and that these, it it's so wild. This is something that we would've culturally rejected with so much aggression 10 years ago. And yet somehow, it's becoming normalized. It's staggering.
JESSICA:
I think that's why it's so important to speak up at every opportunity and interrupt the social norm. I mean, people might think, well, how much of a difference is it gonna make if I'm in a group of people and everyone's talking about something that I think is wrong. Like it doesn't really matter for me to speak up. And my perspective having this research is like, yes, it's really important to speak up because you're interrupting the idea that it's normal, and you're interrupting the idea that a particular point of view is popular. In doing so, it has a huge ripple effect.
ELISE:
I agree with you. I think by saying nothing, we are condoning things that we find absolutely reprehensible and staggering. So no, I'm with you. I do wanna talk about the cops and the, the interruption or the programming in Watts. In part, because I feel like you did an incredible job of humanizing a group of people who have certainly been turned into a group and vilified for understandable reasons, but teasing out what's happening. And, and I mean, there are some staggering statistics that I didn't know, like the fact that more cops die by suicide than die on the job. Just the incredible mental health crisis happening and the compounding trauma of the reality of their lives. And then of course that's projected onto people who they profess to protect and serve. So can we go into that community intervention?
JESSICA:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I spent a lot of time with police officers because I was trying to figure out if it's possible to change their behavior. My question was, are there approaches that actually cause police to behave in ways that are more just, and fair, and respectful, and life affirming toward their communities. And so in order to do that, I had to really understand what is going on in their minds and hearts when they're on the job. And what I found, through spending a lot of time with them, and through a lot of the peer reviewed studies, is that many of the people that we have out in our community purportedly, protecting and serving are extremely impaired humans. Through their work, through their jobs, they experience chronic stress, they experience toxic work environments.
They're frequently have serious sleep problems. Anger problems, aggression problems. Many of them are quite impaired humans. And so, you know, the question is like, how do you fix that? Is that even something that's fixable, because even people who began, I mean, many officers who I talked to said, even people who began with good intentions. And of course we know that there are police officers who go into the field because they want to protect people. They want to help with domestic violence. They wanna protect the communities that they come from, in some cases, even many of those officers over the years become quite hardened and kind of dehumanized by the work that they do. And so there are a couple of approaches that I found to be promising. I mean, the question of course is, do we have the political will to actually put these into place?
But one approach that I found really persuasive is an approach that was developed by Connie Rice, who is a civil rights lawyer in Los Angeles. She'd spent a couple of decades, about 15 years suing the LAPD for discrimination and for abuse. And at one point along the way, she realized that if she really wanted to change the behavior of people in the LAPD, she would have to go inside the organization. She was filing a lawsuit after lawsuit and it wasn't really making a dent in behavior. And so it's a long story, but the gist of it is that she developed a program called the Community Safety Partnership, and the idea behind the program was that police officers were afraid of the people they were serving in some cases, or they stereotyped them.
They stereotyped entire neighborhoods as being perpetrators and victims. And in order to disrupt that stereotyping and that fear officers needed to actually know the people that they were serving. And so she, she developed this program called the Community Safety Partnership in which officers were given different incentives. And I think this is really key. So she, she was given permission to start a small program. And when she was training these officers, she said, you are no longer going to be rewarded for making arrests. You're gonna be rewarded for building relationships, and you're gonna be promoted on the basis of whether you can show that you've created trusting relationships with people in the community. And so this was like very radical, really like very kind of counter-cultural. Um, but she, she started with a small program. They started with four different housing developments in Watts and, and surrounding areas.
And long story short, when it was evaluated over the course of 10 years, they found that it had really changed the way officers were treating citizens. Arrests went down, respectful behavior went up. There was greater trust between police and the citizens they were serving. And interestingly, violent crime also went down out. So one kind of piece of the puzzle that I learned about when I was doing this research is that police behavior itself can either dial up or dial down crime. This is worked done by Tracey Meares at Yale and her colleagues. And what she has found is that when police behave in a disrespectful way toward communities, they are seen as less legitimate. And in turn, the law itself is seen as less legitimate because police are kind of extensions of the law in the eyes of the community. And so conversely, when police behave in fair and respectful and even loving ways toward community members, this can actually have a negative effect on crime. This can actually decrease crime because it increases the legitimacy that the police are perceived as having. And so that is possibly one of the reasons that violent crime went down as a result of this relational program.
ELISE:
Are you optimistic in general? What do you want besides reading your excellent book? What do you want us all to do?
JESSICA:
Oh my gosh. <laugh> this remind me of what I was asked on, on live TV. How do, how would you change our political process to become less divisive? I'm like Oh my God.
ELISE:
I know how to change the political process. We need a more than two party system.
JESSICA:
And get rid of the electoral college.
ELISE:
And ranked voting. What do you want people to do? Like slow down, just acknowledge that they have biases and slow themselves down. What do you want us all? How do you wanna see us all evolve?
JESSICA:
I, there, you know, there are two things I think are really important that we haven't even touched on. One is we all need to learn history because research shows that the more you understand the history of discrimination in the past, the more you're able to perceive it in the present. Hmm. But additionally, and this is really important and related, I think, to your work on patriarchy, it's also really important that we see examples of places and times when our ti the toxic patterns that we have today were not present, because I think this can give us the courage and the creativity to imagine, and to create a time after bias a time after prejudice. So if we think about, you know, ancient Mesopotamia, one of the oldest images of worship in the world is the Vaca vase from 3,200 BC. And this is a, a tall skinny vase that shows a procession of men offering a gifts and offerings to a female deity.
The, the object of worship, the person who was worshiped and revered and adored was female over time. That idea that the feminine could be authoritative, you know, that the ultimate sort of, um, the ultimate, uh, arbiter of, of anything could be a woman, you know, got degraded. So you see the figure of deme over time becoming Saint Demetra, and then becoming Saint Demetrius. So we see the extraction of the feminine from the image of the divine. But if we can remember that there was a time when women were considered divine, you know, when women were considered the ultimate authority, I think that, you know, that's one example that can from history that can sort of give us the, the courage to understand, and to really grasp that these patterns that we have today are not permanent. They're not now not
ELISE:
Permanent, no Gerda Lerner sort of has its obviously it's an evolving number, but 3,100 BC. So a hundred years after that is the beginning of what we start to to know is patriarchy.
JESSICA:
Yes. Yeah. And I mean, there are other cultures, like if you look at the hot and Ashani Confederacy, the Iroquois Confederacy, you see in 1200 to 1800 women having incredible political power women being able to choose chiefs and depose chiefs and meet out capital punishment and control food resources. And so I think, you know, when we, when we expand our imagination to see that the patterns that we live with are culturally and historically contingent, I think that's incredibly powerful. So that's one thing I would say history, learn history, really absorb history.
I think the other thing that I, that I would want people to understand is that we think about expressing bias as something that harms other people and that we shouldn't do it because it harms others. Particularly those of us who are in the majority or are in privileged positions, we, we think, oh, well we need to work on our biases because it's, it's good for other people. And I think the other, you know, the other sort of big transformation that I went through in, in working on this book was, was understanding that my biases also harm me. And this isn't something that I only do for the benefit of others. It's also something I do for the benefit of my myself. Because when I, when I hold biases, when I see others through this like daydream or hallucination, this kind of veil that cuts me off from other people, it isolates me. It makes it harder to have trusting relationships and meaningful, deep connections to other people. And that harms me too. So I think, you know, I, I think sometimes the work of, of anti-bias, or, or justice work can almost take on kind of like a savior sort of flavor. And I think the way out of saviorism is, is understanding that we are all harmed by this and we all benefit from, from tackling these problems.