Combatting the Effects of Implicit Bias in Faculty Searches

Great work by social and cognitive psychologists over the past few years has revealed one weakness of human judgment by developing the notion of “implicit bias,” often taken to mean embedded stereotypes that heavily influence our decision-making without our conscious knowledge. (Take your own implicit bias measurements). As the work evolved some are attempting various interventions to stimulate active reasoning to interrupt the unconscious judgments (see here, for example).

That research investigated some mitigations like efforts to actively recognize stereotyping in a given context; to consciously reflect on individuals who violate the stereotypic assumptions; to seek more detailed information about individuals of a given group based on personal, rather than group attributes; to take the perspective of a member of the given group; and to increase interactions with members of the given group. The experiment showed some impacts of these simple interventions.

Some of the interventions appear to succeed simply by our becoming aware that we are subject to unconscious influences on our judgment. This knowledge alone appears to act as a brake to “fast-thinking” decisions, as Kahneman calls them. It allows our values to be more explicit inputs to our evaluations of others, rather than using superficial criteria.

These are issues that all of us face in daily life, but they are of specific interest as we mount searches for new faculty in the coming year. How can we wisely achieve our goal of increasing the diversity of faculty?

Some lessons of other universities speak to the importance of diversity within search committees themselves; others focus on recruiting actively to produce a diverse pool of candidates from the inception of the search process. And then there are efforts to expose potential effects of implicit biases.

We think we can apply these research results about implicit bias to faculty search committees as part of orientation for search committee chairs. Led by our new Vice-Provost for Faculty, Reena Aggarwal, in collaboration with Rosemary Kilkenny, we also plan to have materials that other search committee members can use.

These efforts are probably most important after fully deterministic criteria are applied. That is, sometimes we receive applications for tenure line positions from Phd’s in the wrong field or from ABD candidates. Sometimes an assistant professor from a lower ranked institution applies for a chaired full professor appointment. Such applications can be easily rejected as unambiguously unqualified.

Some of the techniques are simply ways to force more attention to an evaluation – returning to the stated search criteria, forcing explicit documentation on strengths and weaknesses in addition to overall ratings.

Search committees administer complicated multidimensional and inherently subjective evaluations of potential faculty colleagues. Slowing down the thinking and understanding the individual candidate as much as possible are worthwhile goals.