Have you ever driven down the road, only to be cut off by someone? You roll up next to the other car to get a look at the driver, and you exclaim, “Of course! <Insert group they belong to here> drivers!”
This is one example of implicit bias coming out in your daily experience.
Implicit bias is a subconscious belief about another person, group of people, or ideas. It can be about age, weight, race, beliefs, and even Chevy drivers. Because these thoughts are subconscious and your brain is wired to look for patterns to filter your environment, implicit biases are built subconsciously, without your consent, and they may even conflict with your personal beliefs and values.
In order to overcome implicit bias, there are specific debiasing techniques based on emotional intelligence that are particularly helpful for men.
Men and emotional intelligence
According to one study, women had higher empathy, interpersonal relationship, and social responsibility scores. However, men actually scored higher on other emotional intelligence factors, like self-regard, stress tolerance, and optimism. What this means is that men have a less evolved emotional intelligence than women around the pieces that allow them to relate to other people, even though they tend to have emotional intelligence around how they perceive themselves. This makes men prime candidates for debiasing techniques that develop empathy and understanding for other people.
Empathy development
Well-rounded emotional intelligence teaches you to look through the lens of empathy to truly being able to stand in that person’s shoes. It’s often through empathy that implicit biases are able to shift. Think about empathy as emotional exposure therapy.
In exposure therapy, a patient is exposed to their fears in an effort to overcome them. When you practice empathy, you’re consistently learning to see the world from the vantage point of someone else. As you allow yourself to feel the other person’s emotions and develop an understanding of what they might be going through, it allows your implicit biases to shift because there’s new information to replace the old.
Link to personal growth
Higher emotional intelligence is linked with personal growth and the ability to develop a healthy sense of self. Through personal growth, you go through a discovery process that allows you to view your personality, behaviors, and thoughts so that you can make informed, positive choices in your life moving forward. And when it comes to resolving implicit biases, the process of discovery and awareness is key. It’s only when you discover that an implicit bias exists that you can go about changing it.
Top debiasing techniques for men
There are two debiasing techniques that work especially well for men so that they can increase awareness of their pre-existing biases. Those techniques are perspective-taking and increasing opportunities for contact.
Perspective-taking helps men to pause so they can consider the other person’s point of view before debating, arguing, or making snap judgments. This is especially helpful for men who have a high level of confidence but a lower level of empathy. It’s this practice that gives you space and skills to be aware of the automatic implicit bias that’s been built in your subconscious, so that you can consciously go through the process of understanding other people and why they’re behaving the way that they are. Through perspective-taking, you’re examining a holistic view of any situation so that you can more effectively communicate with others because you can better understand their feelings, even if you don’t agree with them.
Increasing opportunities for contact is another great way to unseat implicit bias. Sometimes implicit biases end up in your subconscious because of something said by an adult when you were a child or even because of a joke you heard in college. Not to mention, different stereotypes are perpetuated throughout any society. So the structure to build implicit bias surrounds you from the time you’re born. Having an implicit bias is not an internal flaw, it’s a process of discovery so that you can overcome it.
When you increase your opportunities for contact with people who you have an implicit bias toward, you reshape your perception as you connect with their experiences. You can start dismantling the false information you’ve held onto because you’re getting real-time exposures that challenge your biases. If you’ve already developed the awareness of some implicit biases within yourself, then you know where to start. As you interact, you can consciously reset the false ideas you had in your mind and replace them with new insights.
While these techniques are effective, please understand that they do take time. Diligent practice here is what makes the long term, marked difference. By adding these practices to your personal growth routine, you not only increase your emotional intelligence, you also help yourself work through implicit biases in everyday life.
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