The dangers of unconscious bias training

To read the press releases, you would think we’ve found the panacea to racism in the form of unconscious bias training. Numerous organisations, including the Labour party, have announced they would be putting their staff through such programmes. This follows in the footsteps of the civil service, which has required all civil servants to undertake unconscious bias training since 2018, magistrates, for whom the training is compulsory, and the Met police, where it forms part of ongoing officer training. Google, Facebook, the FTSE 100, government departments — including the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Justice — and non-profits proudly advertise the programmes they put their staff through. But the one rather important question nobody is asking is: does unconscious bias training actually work? And to that question science provides us a clear answer: no, it doesn’t.

A sensible place to start in understanding why unconscious bias training doesn’t work, is to look at unconscious bias itself and what we know about it.

Unconscious bias is the notion that a person’s subconscious makes association between mental representations of objects in memory and that this is a learned mechanism. The problem is that we don’t know whether this is true, or whether any subconscious association reliably translates into real-world behaviours. We do know that humans learn heuristics and that some of these are passed down through genetics, i.e. are hard-wired into our brains. For example, humans have learned to shy away from touching objects that emit light, as this is a reasonable indicator that the object is also hot.

Psychologists are also unable to tell the difference between an unconscious bias and instantaneous perception. Nor do they know the difference between unconscious bias and preference for in-groups (the same behavioural trait through which we decide to reserve our love and care for our families rather than attempting to spread it across the whole population).