I just finished the Psychology of Diversity and Unconscious Bias Udemy course. It was an excellent course with explanations that were clear and backed by science papers, so I enjoyed it. In this post I will write an overview of the course.
The course starts with a few definitions, the main ones being:
- Stereotypes – beliefs we have of specific groups
- Prejudice – negative feelings we have towards specific groups
- Discrimination – we treat specific groups differently
Other important concepts were In-groups and Out-groups – the former being a group an individual belongs to, and the latter being a group that an individual doesn’t belong to. The discussion then led to the Minimal group paradigm, in which psychologists found the minimal settings of a group such that members belonging to it are biased.
Interestingly, for the minimal group paradigm, the minimum criteria are trivial. For example, people may be biased just by their color preference, e.g. blue or red color. This method made me realize the connection with Closures in mathematics. In general, it seems interesting how we can map most of the ideas discussed in the course to the language of mathematics. I’d assume that Mathematical psychology is on its rise as a field? The reason for that is I guess we have more tools now, than we ever had, with social media platforms and all the data we have online which allow us to do further researches in social psychology, but I digress.
Here are some cool strategies for resolving unconscious bias:
- Contact theory – Make contact
- Common ingroup – Find a common ingroup (e.g. we’re both humans, etc.)
- Stereotype replacement
- Be aware when you make a stereotypical judgement
- Think why it happened
- Replace
- Perspective taking – empathy
- Remind yourself of superheroes -> bias useless (e.g. Neil deGrasse Tyson)
In any case, I really enjoyed the course and highly suggest for anyone working in a multicultural environment to give it a try.
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