Stanford’s Graduate School of Business recently published an article on a new study co-authored by organizational behavior professor Nir Halevy that reveals new, more nuanced strategies to address both intentional and unintentional discrimination.
Halevy explains, “Many people have a strong belief that one size fits all when it comes to improving race relations in the U.S. Understanding people’s perceptions allows us to help people by recommending an approach that is more likely to be effective for improving race relations.”
Participants in the study were presented with a few true-to-life and hypothetical scenarios and then surveyed on their PIRD—or “perceived intentionality of racial discrimination.” Halevy’s team discovered that these perceptions “are malleable enough that they can change following personal experiences.”
Participants who were confronted with intentional discrimination were said to have favored a “colorblind” purview that “urges people to look beyond differences” in order to combat it. Ignorant or unintentional discrimination, on the other hand, could be treated with offering a “multicultural” method to highlight “the distinct qualities and experiences of individuals of different cultures.”
At one point in Halevy’s research, he and his co-authors—MIT’s Evan Apfelbaum and Rebecca Grunberg of MIT and the University of Toronto’s Sonia Kang—asked participants to “imagine themselves as jurors in an employment discrimination case” who would decide “how much money to award the plaintiff.” According to the study, the most important factor in their decision was “whether the discrimination had been intentional.” For intentional discrimination, the theoretical jury argued that the plaintiff was entitled $294,000 as opposed to $178,000 for unintentional discrimination.
Halevy concludes that the most salient conclusion the study offers is the need to take “people’s attribution of racial discrimination” into consideration when analyzing and ultimately addressing employee relations, particularly when in terms of race. “The more that leaders understand what people see as the root of the problem — malice or ignorance — the more likely they are to come up with effective solutions.”