How to Question Questionable Beliefs

Something curious happens with racially prejudiced beliefs. Your life experiences won’t automatically challenge them. For example, if you are white, ask yourself how old you were when you had an authority figure in your life who wasn’t white.?

For me, it wasn’t until I was in college and took a class with Toni Morrison. I was lucky to get an incredible education on many dimensions from her. She taught us to go looking for racist beliefs that were hiding not so far below the surface in canonical American literature. She shared that education with everyone in her book Playing in the Dark. I recommend it.

Is this a bias hardening into a prejudice? Are you misusing the data to insist that people conform to what is on average true but not always true?

If you do have such essentializing beliefs lurking in your mind, you may find it a relief to let go of them. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “What people have endlessly sought to prove is that woman is superior, inferior, or equal to man . . . To see clearly, one needs to get out of these ruts; these vague notions of superiority, inferiority, and equality that have distorted all discussions must be discarded in order to start anew.”

Let’s all just try to become our best, truest selves and break free of these prejudices that create false, limiting comparisons! How can you do it? Here are three things to keep top of mind:

1. Don’t dichotomize and degrade

2. Don’t make the fundamental attribution error

3. Don’t expect everything to conform to average

Don’t Dichotomize and Degrade?

People who hold prejudiced beliefs will often dichotomize and degrade. They will open a conversation by setting up a false, essentializing dichotomy and then degrading one side of the false dichotomy.?

Men are “this,” women are “that,” and “this” is better than “that.” Boomers are “this,” millennials are “that,” and “this” is better than “that.”

For example, Pythagoras wrote, “There is a good principle that created order, light, and man, and a bad principle that created chaos, darkness, and woman.” Ridiculous. I’m not saying we have to reject the Pythagorean theorem. Pythagoras’s ideas about triangles have stood the test of time. His ideas about women have not.

Challenge your beliefs rigorously.

Don’t Make the Fundamental Attribution Error

The fundamental attribution error refers to an individual’s tendency to use perceived personality attributes—“You’re an idiot”—to explain someone else’s behavior rather than considering the situational factors that may at least in part have been the cause of the other person’s behavior (which is the grace we tend to give ourselves).?It’s a problem because:

1. It’s generally inaccurate
2. It renders an otherwise solvable problem hard to solve because it invokes a fixed mindset
3. It makes it less likely that we might consider how our own behavior may have influenced the situation and therefore less likely to start by soliciting feedback before dishing it out.

Don’t Expect Everything to Conform to Average

Ask yourself, “Even if it is true on average, does it apply to the specific situation at hand?”

As Todd Rose describes in his book The End of Average, when the US Air Force designed a cockpit for the “average” pilot, they designed a cockpit for no one.?

This is why, if we want Radical Respect, we must always be defeating the tyranny of the average and instead respecting each person’s individuality and adjusting to it.

If you find yourself questioning or mocking people who don’t conform to some arbitrary average, stop and think. Why are you doing this? Is this a bias hardening into a prejudice? Are you misusing the data to insist that people conform to what is on average true but not always true?

Radical Respect is a weekly newsletter I am publishing on LinkedIn to highlight?some of the things that get in the way of creating a collaborative, respectful working environment. A healthy organization is not merely an absence of unpleasant symptoms. Creating a just working environment is about eliminating bad behavior and reinforcing collaborative, respectful behavior. Each week I'll offer tips on how to do that so you can create a workplace where everyone feels supported and respected. Learn more in my new book Radical Respect , available wherever books are sold! You can also follow Radical Candor? and the Radical Candor Podcast more tips about building better relationships at work.