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GLD Portfolio
SYDNEY PICKETT
KEY INSIGHT 3:
Reevaluating Your Bias for the Betterment of Future Judgements
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I do not think I will ever understand what appropriate diversity is. In my hometown, everyone, including me, had family wealth, access to good public schools, and some sort of privilege whether that be wealth, gender, sexual orientation, or race. It was not taught that there are people outside of the white affluent suburb of Evans, Georgia that go through hardships like lack of money, basic necessities, and education. Having parents who came from humble beginnings of poverty and segregation, it was hard for me to fully grasp that there were people who did not have any sort of privilege. Even as a person of color, I still considered myself as privileged because I was fortunate to have a house with two parent who have professional degrees that helped them earn high earning jobs. Growing up it seemed, that I could only relate or feel comfortable around those who match the qualities of my family or hometown. I did not realize how problematic that could be until I came to college where I was introduced to many different people from different backgrounds. Some of my closest friends in college are people who I would have avoided in high school due to previous beliefs of being closer towards people who have similar backgrounds. This caused me to reevaluate how my past has influenced my point of view of others and how I have changed them since high school.
I feel that reflecting on my own personal bias in my social psychology class and throughout the recruitment process has made me reevaluate my past beliefs and how I can change them. I have already looked at how I choose my interactions with others everyday especially as a University Ambassador. On tours and in my personal life, I make an effort to get to know everyone in my group as equally as possible and not be automatically drawn to talk to people who I may feel comfortable talking to. Even though finding out that you have bias may feel uncomfortable, it was beneficial to take a look inwards to see how I can challenge my own ideals from my privileged background.
The recruitment process consisted of interviewing over two hundred applicants through a three-week long interview process. Taking my psychology class emphasized that everyone has unconscious bias, including me, so when planning this recruitment, I wanted to extinguish as much bias as possible. We eliminated name and involvement from applications so the recruitment committee would not be able to know about the person’s background to build assumptions. Applicants were solely scored on their application. From all of the implicit bias tests I took the results showed that I have a preference towards people with darker skin tone and people from minority communities. In class I learned that some of the main ways to reduce implicit bias is to be objective, not make assumptions of first impressions and recognizing that you have this bias towards certain people. Knowing this, I made a detailed, objective rubric on how I was going to score applicants and tried to have others with me when interviewing. I made sure that in the rubric strictly defined qualities and answers we were looking for and to prevent implicit bias. I defined subjective skills like coachability and professionalism and throughout the process I made sure to judge applicants based on that definition not based on what I personally think characterizes those traits. Also, I created objective standards when scoring applicants off the rubric. This included applicants’ presentation skills of eye contact, volume, and clarity of voice as well as writing out how applicants should answer interview questions. I did not want any potential applicant to be affected by my personal bias so putting these definitions and rubrics in place helped objectify the process more. Located in the artifacts section is an excerpt of the presentation me and my co-captains gave to the University Ambassador organization. In this presentation we went over the importance of objectivity, fairness, and use of rubrics during the group interview portion of recruitment.
Through my Psychology minor, I have taken classes that have allowed me to analyze how the interworking of my mind affect my attitudes, perception and behaviors. Learning more in depth how my life influence before college affects my outlook on the world now. One of the most influential classes that I was able to take was PSYC 430, The Survey of Social Psychology. Social psychology, is the field of psychology that studies how different situations affect us, specifically those involving influence from other people.
We learned everything from why people have social interactions to why do people have the urge to fit in and why you act the way you do. At the beginning of the semester our class focused heavily on implicit bias, which is being unconsciously prejudice to a certain groups of people. Besides learning what it was, we learned how it influences your day-to-day interactions with others and how to mitigate it. In one assignment my professor had us take several official Harvard implicit association tests to discover our own unconscious biases. From there we had to reflect on potentially why we could have been biased and ways you can decrease your bias to certain groups of people. I have taken some implicit bias tests before however; this is the first time I have been asked to reflect why I am biased and how I can fix it. When choosing the tests, I did one that I have done before and a new one. I wanted to do one of the same because I want to see if I had done anything to have changed my bias, but I wanted to do a new one to see if I could find out something new about myself. Linked in the artifacts section I have included my reflection of my results from the Harvard Implicit Association Test.
Doing the implicit bias test and reflecting on their causes has opened my eyes to understand how my privileged upbringing has skewed someone of my impressions of certain people. Knowing that I am skewed by certain groups of people, I was a little nervous on how it would affect my execution of the Recruitment Captain leadership role for University Ambassadors. The same semester of taking my psychology class, I was in charge of recruiting the newest cohort of tour guides for the university.
ARTIFACTS
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