Dolly Chugh: Why “Good People” Struggle with Bias and What to Do About It

0:07We first released this episode with Dolly Chugh more than a year ago, but its message feels even more relevant today. Dolly is a social psychologist at NYU and she studies how good people confront bias, rethink the stories we tell about history and keep improving things. She challenges the idea that we should aim to be good and instead encourages us to be good-ish, always learning and getting better. In this episode, she shares practical tools for grappling with uncomfortable truths about our past. If you missed it the first time, it's worth a listen now.

0:55first i have to say this word varadharajan oh yeah that's a deep cut there gita varadharajan i haven't said her name in a while i hope i'm saying it right varadharajan so i was close yeah good good work you went all the way back and your last name is chug chug chug yeah chug it's like the sounding good like uh chug because i want to be sensitive well thank you for trying how do you say your last name my last name is you just you can call me anything you want it's kawasaki i've heard you say it on your podcast in your preface of the person you mean to be you cite of all books hillbilly elegy fast forward to today what does jd vance's alignment with donald trump mean I have wondered about that because that book, we saw so much heart and so much humanity and so much thoughtfulness and intelligence.

2:14I don't follow his career closely, but I am aware that he's aligned himself. And I find that surprising and disappointing and confusing. That's it? You don't have an explanation? Well, I mean, the explanation would seem to be that it's hard to believe that he believes what he's saying because of what he wrote. That's the part that's confusing. If we didn't have evidence that he thought differently from his book, then it wouldn't be so confusing or surprising. I don't have an explanation. He clearly is running for office. Maybe it's strategic. I guess but the question you have to ask is does the book reflect his true beliefs or is his true belief now coming out and the book was bs fair enough that's a fair question I guess I had assumed the book would be more true but we also don't know books get ghost ghost written I always assumed he wrote it but yeah I don't know he's a mystery and I've wondered I have wondered more than once so this is not the JD Vance podcast that's enough about it I could just for me give me the kind of bias for dummies overview give me the gist of bias sure the gist of bias is that most of our mind's work happens on autopilot.

3:48One study says that in the snap of my fingers, we each had 11 million thoughts, only 40 of which were in our conscious mind, and 99.9999 % of which were outside of our awareness. Like you understanding the words saying without having to think deeply about what they mean or feeling the temperature of the room air around you without thinking about that or knowing to sit up and not lie down right now without consciously thinking about it. Those are things we're doing on autopilot and those are what we mean by 11 million thoughts like little t thoughts and because so much of our mind's work is outside of our awareness on autopilot there's there's thoughts and actions that we aren't always aware we're engaging in and as a result we may sometimes engage in unconscious biases that would surprise us that part of our brain the 40 big t thoughts might fight it out if it knew what the rest of the brain was doing i just want to say that i just spoke about only one form of bias the one i'm most familiar with unconscious bias there are of course other forms of bias conscious bias, the kind that the big T thoughts part of our brain very explicitly says, I don't like this kind of thing.

5:15I don't like Pepsi or I don't like this kind of person. And those are also biases. It's just not the kind of bias I study. You mentioned that you've been in meetings where because you're a woman and you're Indian, some white male assumed you were the secretary assistant or, you know, asked you to turn the lights on or off or go get coffee or something. Would you say that's unconscious bias or conscious bias at this point? Yeah, that's an interesting question. And of course, I don't know why he assumed that. I, we just string together evidence in these instances. is that I think that was, I would think it was unconscious bias.

6:01I've made the same mistake. I attended my business school reunion before I became an academic. I had a business career and I have an MBA. And I went to my MBA reunion where they have people of different eras, like it's every five years classes. So, you can be there with someone 30 years older than you. And there was an older black woman who was standing near the registration area where I was also to register and she was considerably older than me. And I assumed she worked there. I assumed she was there to take care of an administrative task of getting me checked in and then was embarrassed to realize she was there just like I was as an MBA alum.

6:43And that is not to diminish the roles of setting up rooms or checking people in. It's simply to say that the assumption that just based off of visually looking at somebody, I know they're in that role. That's what that's the unconscious part that I've just created this mental association between a particular demographic and a particular role. Can I tell you a great unconscious bias story? Yes. Firsthand knowledge. Yes. So my wife and I used to live in San Francisco on Union Street where Union Street dead ends into the Presidio. okay that's a very nice part of san francisco and one day i was out there trimming the bougainvillea hedge and this older white woman comes up to me and says do you do lawns also what are your rates and so you know i immediately confront her and i say oh i'm japanese so you assume i'm the yard man right and she says no no you're just doing such a great job i wanted to know if you do lawns so that's a good story about unconscious bias right there that's a great story but but wait it gets better keep going wait did you take the job yeah i had just been laid off from apple so yeah a couple weeks later my father visits me from hawaii and i'm sansei so he's nisei he's japanese yeah second generation japanese american and i tell him this story and I fully expect him to just go off, right?

8:19How dare this woman insult you? You went to Stanford, you have an MBA, you've written 10 books, you work for Steve Jobs, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Instead, he says to me, you know, son, statistically, a Japanese person cutting a hedge on Union Street in San Francisco, most likely you were the yard man. Don't get offended, take the high road and don't look for trouble where there isn't any. Right. In some ways, both are true, right? Like there's something to both of that. Base rates are a thing is what he was saying. And at the same time, we want to check ourselves in those moments and we want to help other people notice what they might not be noticing.

9:02I'm assuming we are both holders and targets of unconscious biases in different parts of our lives. well who isn't exactly exactly wow do you think that the democratic party needs more heat or more light right now yeah let's start by explaining the dichotomy so this is a metaphor that many have used and i couldn't actually find the original source so i'm giving credit to the universe for this. The idea of heat versus light is how you try to make change or influence others. And when you do it through using tools of light, it's gentle and meeting people where they are and teaching and discussing and explaining and it's incremental.

9:50A heat-based approach to making change pushes people beyond where they're comfortable. It's viewed as more radical than incremental. By definition, it's meant to heat things up, to disrupt things that are happening. It may show up in the form of a protest or a disruption of a discussion or a pivot on a topic when people are like, just go with the flow. And this idea of heat and light, many of us have, just by our temperament, you know, we kind of are lean towards one or the other. I would say I lean towards light in my personality. I have more of a people-pleasing personality. And when I first started writing my first book, The Person You Mean to Be, I sent it to a dear friend from graduate school and asked for her feedback.

10:39She's a social psychologist like I am. And she gave me lots of very thoughtful feedback about the sort of way in which I was explaining scholarship and etc. And then she said almost as a throwaway in her feedback, she said, you know, I guess, you know, you're okay with the Black Lives Matter folks, or they might be a little annoyed with this book. And I was like, wait, I opened the book. I literally opened the book with me at a Black Lives Matter protest, supporting, why would they be mad at me? She's like, yeah, but you also say you realize why you're at the protest, the protests aren't for you, and this is all too, too much.

11:16And I was like, whoa, I do say that. But what I meant by it was that I'm more suited for light, not that I am against heat. And so what I did was I looked up the research by people who study social movements, and they have found that movements that have a lot more heat and not much light or vice versa don't make as much progress as movements that have both heat and light. That balance is actually critical to moving things forward. And my hypothesis, I don't have data around this, but my hypothesis is that light changes minds, but heat changes systems. And that's why we need both. So to your question, the Democratic Party, and do they need more heat or more light?

12:00That's interesting. I'm trying to think how I would characterize the way it is now, because I think, depending on who's looking at the Democratic Party, I think those who are not Democrats might feel the Democratic Party is throwing out a lot of heat. But I think a lot of people within the Democratic Party think they need more heat. So I don't think I know the answer. I do think there is a dearth of understanding around a lot of these issues right now, which is why I'm writing the things I'm writing. I'm trying to speak to people who are willing to learn and reach hearts and minds that way, because I think there's a lot of hand waving and not a lot of listening and learning.

13:00I started off this interview with pronunciations of last names. And I just want to return to that quickly, that you make a huge deal about that in your writing. and including your website has a little audio snippet that you can click on to hear the correct pronunciation of your name. Why is this such a big deal? I think I've lived my whole life with people saying my name wrong and I've become very comfortable with that. So I don't take that as seriously as I take taking other people's names seriously seriously and wanting to encourage organizations, schools, and companies to take advantage of the easily available free technology that we have available now that makes it completely trivial for us to be able to hear how people say their names.

13:56And that should just be widely institutionalized. In this day and age, it shouldn't be that hard to know what is correct and to make the effort. why is it important and someone's name is pretty much the first decision we make parent makes or the family members make about that child and for us to dismiss it is to really dismiss their underlying identity I will tell you in my own personal experience I'm really not intuitive about how to say a lot of names and what I tend to do then is avoid the person because I don't want to say the name wrong. And so then what happens is, and so I can see this in the classroom when I have students from all over the world in my classes, my MBA classrooms, and I, you know, I'll see lots of hands up and I'll be like, I know how to say that name.

14:42I know how to say that name. I don't know how to say that name. And so I started asking my students to do a survey before this semester begins, where they write out for me phonetically how to say their name and they record it using namedrop.io, which is one of the free apps out there. So I can practice before. And it's not that hard. If we can, no one's asking us to be Meryl Streep. We can learn how to say, you know, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or the names on Games of Thrones. Like we can learn how to say Kawasaki. It's doable. And so I think it's just a matter of if I'm avoiding people whose names I don't know how to pronounce, I'm probably avoiding people who are different than me.

15:22So it just runs directly against the effort I'm putting in in so many ways and so many other people are to be inclusive. Please explain why one should strive to be better or quote goodish instead of good. Yeah I'm on a mission to get us to let go of trying to be good people and to be goodish instead and the reason is that we tend to think of being a good person as either you are or you aren't. It's this very brittle either or identity. And in the work of a psychologist, Carol Dweck, I would call that a fixed mindset. When you're in a fixed mindset, you don't view yourself as being a work in progress.

16:07So, let's say when it comes to drawing, I believe I'm not very good at drawing and I don't believe that I will get better with practice. And I might also believe in another area like pickleball. I might believe I'm very good at pickleball and I do not need a pickleball lesson to get better at pickleball. I am good at pickleball. And so, in both of those areas, I'm showing a fixed mindset that I don't need feedback or practice or coaching. And I think that's how we tend to view being a good person. Like it is what it is. I'm advocating that we think of ourselves as goodish people. That's a growth mindset, according to Dweck and colleagues, is one in which we are always getting better.

16:49Maybe we're like I am in drawing, we're not very good, or I see myself in pickleball as being very good. But whatever it is, I could still get better. And the key with that is that when I make a mistake, I own it and I try to do better. So when I misidentify that woman at the registration table at my MBA reunion, I learn something from it rather than like try to dismiss it or pretend It didn't happen or do all the things we do with our mishaps. And so being goodish means I'm better today than I was yesterday. And the amazing thing about it, and we know this from so many parts of our lives, is we do this all the time.

17:25In our jobs, we're usually better now than we were a year ago. In our relationships with our children, it depends how old our kids are, but we're trying to be better parents now than we were a year ago. Like in every part of our lives, we're getting better all the time. But there's something about this good person thing where we're frozen. And so being good is just better than good because it lets us get better all the time. Now, I just want to point out for the listeners that you are the captain of your college tennis team. So you saying you're good at pickleball is not, you just happen to be good at pickleball.

18:03There's a little bit of background there in full disclosure. Fair enough. though according to the folks at the pickleball courts i started playing a week ago by the way according to the folks at the pickleball courts they're very different sports so i'm still trying to learn the differences the rules are very different i know that yeah but it helps to be a division one college absolutely i got some good uh racket skills i suspect roger federer would be very good at pickleball can you imagine did you hear lebron james has just got it bought an ownership stake in a pickleball league yeah i mean how much could it cost to buy a pickleball team a thousand dollars if lebron's doing it must be big money yeah it's a big sport i don't know about out by you but here it's the rage it's huge you begin your new book with just like one of the most dramatic falling on your sword episodes of business books ever.

19:11Like you're the first business book author to ever display humility at the start of his or her book. Oh, that's too funny. So let's just talk about this. I guess maybe traumatic is the right word. Traumatic trip that aligned with the depiction of the American history with Little House on the Prairie. So, just what was wrong there? Yeah, well, the trip was actually fabulous. It was the aftermath. So, I, like millions of others, have loved the Little House on the Prairie book series. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote these books based off of her childhood and sort of this colonial upbringing in her hardworking family.

19:56And I read them to my children when they were young. the whole series. It took a year of reading to them every night, eight books, 200 some pages each. And we really like the Ingalls family became part of our family. They were like living with us. They were in our minds and our hearts and our souls. And so much so we decided to spend a family vacation driving around South Dakota and Minnesota to the places where the family actually lived. And, see those sights and really breathe in the kind of reality of their lives and this big prairie sky. And it was going to be this educational trip and this fun trip.

20:38And it was a wonderful trip, actually. It was terrific. But when we were there, I was in the back of my mind being like, wait, this land was Native American land before the Ingalls got here. Ingalls and lots of others who colonized that land. And I just, I kind of was having these nudges in my head that I should try to understand that better and I should try to help my children understand that better. It's referred to very tangentially in the books and in a pretty derogatory way about when the settlers come in, the Indians have to move on and things like that. And I'm sure I said something like one or two sentences when I was reading it to them, but never really explained to them.

21:22And so here we are, and I'm with my kids. They're six and seven years old at the time, and they're old enough. I mean, kids that age understand fair play and justice and someone taking your things. That's definitely in their vocabulary. And I could have broached the topic, and I didn't. I just didn't. And in the years and the decades since then, I've thought about that and realized that the issue wasn't really that I didn't know if they could handle it. It's that I didn't know if I could handle it. I just, I had this idealized version of this American story and this narrative and this family and I just didn't want to touch it because all these emotions would like, I wouldn't know what to do with them.

22:07And so, this book really comes, this book meaning the book I wrote, A More Just Future, comes from me grappling with those emotions and not grappling with those emotions and wondering if there's someone out there who can help me figure out how to deal with this. You know, I'm a psychologist. I know there's research. I couldn't find anything that had been written up for a general audience. So, in the end, I wrote the book that I felt like I needed to read. So the trip was really kind of a catalyst, I would say, more than a trauma. It was an opportunity to notice something that was bubbling inside me that I really hadn't dealt with.

22:46And if you were on the school board of your local school district and the topic came up of textbooks, what history textbook would you select? So, to be clear, I'm not a historian, and in fact, I'm not even a history buff. I've written a book about how to grapple with history. And so, while I wouldn't know what history book to select, what I would know is that we want to grapple with as full a version of history as we can. And so that means we want to hear multiple perspectives. I would look for a text and primary sources that give us multiple perspectives on events. So if I were talking about when the Ingalls family was settling in Minnesota, I would also want to hear from the perspectives of the people who lived there before it was even called Minnesota and before the Ingalls family arrived, not only the white settlers perspective.

23:52and I think when we don't include that material maybe some of the arguments we're hearing is that it creates shame and guilt what I'm trying to say is we can deal with those emotions we have tools for dealing with those emotions kids can deal with it and adults can deal with it what's much harder for us to do is unlearn it after the fact it's clear from research that it's easier to learn something the right way the first time, then have to go back and unlearn it and relearn it. And that's exactly what I, you know, in that trip with my kids and the year of reading them those books, I set them up for having to do a whole bunch of unlearning down the road.

24:33So, your head must literally be exploding when parents around the country are trying to ban black studies, basically. Being a parent's hard. And so I get that there's a million ways in which a parent tries to protect their children. I don't agree with all the ways, but I get it. But yes, I don't think parents are doing their kids any favors there. I think their kids are so much more resilient and capable, and we are setting them up for a much tougher future, not just in terms of the unlearning, but also in terms of them. There's research by a psychologist, Fia Salter and others, that talks about how much better we are at seeing systemic, let's say, racism in the present when we know just a little bit of history about the past.

25:28And when we don't give our kids that little bit of history about the past, we really set them up to not understand what's happening right now. And so, when they look around the world around them and they say, black people live in these neighborhoods and white people live in those neighborhoods and Japanese people live in those neighborhoods and Indian people live in those neighborhoods. And it just looks preordained. It doesn't look like there's a cause and effect for it. It makes it really difficult for them to deal with the kinds of tensions and discussions and conflicts that they are going to deal with.

25:56And not to mention, you know, built the lost friendships, the lost opportunities, the lost humanity. So, I think we have so many opportunities to help our kids through how we teach history that maybe we're scared of, but it's not going to be as scary as we think. If you buy the theory that if you don't understand history, you're doomed to repeat it, it seems to me that with so much history being whitewashed, we are going to repeat a lot of problems so what how do we get out of this vicious cycle yeah at one point i googled that famous phrase to see if there's any like evidence to actually support that statement and i think in the end it was inconclusive if i remember right so even if we don't buy that premise i think we want to stop we want to know the history because even if it doesn't change what happens in the future.

26:56It absolutely changes what happens in the present. How do we break the cycle? I think right now we're having this argument of should we teach it or shouldn't we? It's like we should or we shouldn't as if those are the only two choices. And what I'm trying to offer is a different approach that we should do it, but it isn't like we just drop this hot potato on people and see what they do with it. It's that we have some oven mitts we can put on, we can use some tools that help people deal with emotions like shame and guilt and disbelief and make us more resilient when we want to be like, no, no, or throw the potato, it's too hot.

27:35We can be a little more resilient towards it. And so, I talk about being a gritty patriot using the work that psychologist Angela Duckworth has done on grit, passion, and perseverance in pursuit of a meaningful long-term goal is something we can apply here that rather than thinking of love of country, I love my country so deeply, but is it something I'm just entitled? I'm just entitled to love my country or should I have to work at it? Should patriotism be something that is a meaningful long-term goal that's going to require some passion and perseverance for me? And I'm offering that being a gritty patriot might be the path forward.

28:10You mentioned a really great contrast between the United States and Germany. So if you, not you, but if the listener ever goes to Berlin, it's hard to miss that memorial in the middle of Berlin. And it is a very eerie memorial. is there any scientific research or proof that the german approach to the holocaust which is not denial has proven to be a better approach yeah that's a great question i actually haven't been to berlin i certainly write about that in my book and i write about what i've read about it but i haven't been there myself so it's interesting to hear your personal observation so i don't know of scientific studies that have explicitly studied it in the way you just described but I'm following a line of like logic which is if we don't know about something it's really hard to acknowledge it it's really hard to apologize for it and if it still is its impact is still being held today and some people are feeling the impact and some people aren't, then you are doomed to have conflict because those people are feeling the impact, still acknowledge and remember it, and those people who don't even know what happened are not sure why those people are so upset.

29:40So, it just seems so logical to me. From what I read about what's happening in Germany, me, there's certainly, it's not like it's a utopia in terms of where things stand now, but at least there's an effort being made. And I think that's where a lot of us are struggling. We want to make that effort. I think many people want to. That's what I'm hearing in reaction to the people who are reading my book in advance, is they're saying, ah, this is the thing I like, don't know what to do about, like how to think about these things. And I think it wasn't just me who was struggling in this area. A lot of us are looking for a way forward.

30:22Would you discuss the most important things that we need to unlearn? I have a chapter that focuses on racial fables. And racial fables are narratives about how change has happened so far. So, for example, how did the civil rights movement unfold? And a lot of us know the story, for example, of Rosa Parks, except the story we know about Rosa Parks, who's other than U.S. presidents, I believe the most famous name in America. It turns out we don't know the story of Rosa Parks. What's amazing is the story we know is largely untrue. It's like a little kid's version of the story that was sanitized and simplified that all of us just accepted as grown-ups and historian Jean Thea Harris has written the first definitive, she's a scholar but it's a general audience book but it's sort of a heavily footnoted biography of Rosa Parks in which she shows that literally almost everything we think is true like beginning with the fact that we all describe her as elderly, she was 42.

31:30She was 42, this elderly seamstress on the bus. She also had a long life history of being rebellious, of being an activist, of spending most of her evenings and weekends volunteering for the NAACP, fighting racism. This is before she wouldn't give up her seat on the bus. So, there was nothing surprising about what happened that day. The only thing that was surprising is that it happened to be that day. The reason that's so important that we realize that what we've learned is a racial fable, not the truth, is that it gives us this false impression about how change happens. We expect a singular hero to rise and say, oh, by the way, I don't know if you all noticed, but this isn't really fair.

32:15And then we expect everyone else to be like, oh my gosh, you're so right. Oh man, how did I miss that? Let's fix it. fixed. And it feels like a one and done kind of thing. But what actually happened is there were many people who wouldn't give up their seats on the bus before Rosa Parks. No change came as a result. They were not treated as heroes at all. And they were in fact vilified for their actions by the people who felt they were being disrespectful and breaking the law and not following cultural norms and so forth. And so, this racial fable leads us to look for someone who we think is Rosa Parks today, who's going to be very docile and palatable, and then we wait for everybody to agree with her, and then we wait for Martin Luther King to give his speech, and then it all feels very simple.

33:11And we forget that Martin Luther King was viewed as a radical and as someone who was moving too fast by the vast majority of white Americans in the 60s. And that he and she were just two of thousands and thousands of activists at the time and before that time and since that time. So, this was not a couple of heroes who got instant results. It was many, many people whose results almost always failed until they didn't. And so, I already forgot the question. I'm on such a roll, Guy, but I think it was - The question was about what to unlearn. What to unlearn, yes. So, we want to unlearn racial fables because they really, this is a great example about how it hurts us in the present.

33:56It means that when we're sitting in a meeting at work and somebody is really getting animated and trying to question our hiring practices, and we're like, why are they being so divisive? They're moving too fast and we want to just dismiss them and tone police them when they're bringing heat, not light. We're failing to see that this is what it feels like to be around a Rosa Parks or a Martin Luther King. This is how change happens. I must admit that I didn't know all the background of Rosa Parks until I read your book. I fell into the fable of seems just gets on a bus decides to stand up for herself at that day without any forethought and becomes a hero i think many many many of us there's actually the book i just referred to the definitive biography is being made into a movie that's releasing this fall i think it's by the same title the rebellious life of mrs rosa parks and i haven't seen the movie but i have read the book and i expect the movie has some wonderful filmmakers and storytellers behind it including sold out of Brian.