"One meta-analysis of 985 studies of anti-bias interventions found little evidence that these programs reduced bias. Other studies sometimes do find a short-term change in attitudes, but very few find a widespread change in actual behavior." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/opinion/social-change-bias-training.html?smid=em-share

“I see most implicit bias training as window dressing that looks good both internally to an organization and externally, as if you’re concerned and trying to do something. But it can be deployed without actually achieving anything, which makes it in fact counterproductive.”

"But to date, none of these interventions has been shown to result in permanent, long-term reductions of implicit bias scores or, more importantly, sustained and meaningful changes in behavior.”

"Part of the problem is that a lot of discrimination is structural; not in people’s attitudes but in organizational practices and the way society is set up."

Part of the problem is that “There’s surprisingly little correlation between most people’s attitudes and behavior. And the correlation between bias and discrimination is weak.”

Our model of “teaching people to be good” is based on the illusion that you can change people’s minds and behaviors by presenting them with new information and new thoughts. If this were generally so, moral philosophers would behave better than the rest of us. They don’t.

People change when they are put in new environments, in permanent relationship with diverse groups of people. Their embodied minds adapt to the environments in a million different ways.

Social psychologist Gordon Allport wrote about the contact hypothesis, that doing life together with people of other groups can reduce prejudice and change minds. It’s how new emotional bonds are formed, how new conceptions of who is “us” and who is “them” come into being.

Real change seems to involve putting bodies from different groups in the same room, on the same team and in the same neighborhood.