Does anyone have experience with these courses? I’m all for them in theory but I’m skeptical they’d ever be particularly effective
Sounds like a good idea in all honesty. Why hold such courses when you are clearly not going to engage with the subject matter with sincerity? The course itself may have some issues, however those are meaningless if the Tories have no intention of fixing their unconscious biases to begin with. You cannot change people who do not want to change and it is clear that unconscious biases are something the Conservatives are happy to conserve.
They really do love to revel in their ignorance don’t they. Can’t risk learning something new and growing as a person .
Without knowing the contents of the course, it’s impossible to make any judgement.
Saying that, I don’t think unconscious bias is a worry for them, most of them wear their prejudice on their sleeve, nice and open.
These courses are dangerous. I know someone who is on the autistic spectrum and had such a training. She needed some works done in the house and hired someone that was totally off, but she didn’t want to appear biased or have her “prejudice” deprive someone of the job. As she explained, she took everything literally from that course and she thought that the alarm bells was just her biases, so she decided to ignore them.
Well, he scammed her out of a couple of grand and work had to be redone.
>We send short email requests to 10,268 local government representatives from each of the main political parties, from stereotypically Islamic, Jewish, and Christian names. Response rates are six to seven percentage points lower to stereotypically Muslim or Jewish names. The two major political parties both show equal bias towards the two minority group names. Results suggest that the bias in response may be implicit
But of course, Heaven forbid they might engage in anything that might grant them some level of self awareness.
Honestly there is probably no point of unconscious bias training in the conservative party given that they seem to be completely fine with 100% conscious bias.
Good. Having taken several of these courses myself they’re nothing but an expensive arse covering exercise filled with critical theory nonsense.
I’ve trained these courses in my career and as others have posted, they’re as useful as the people taking them want them to be.
But I’ve gotta be honest, the one thing I’ve taken away from it all is that most biases are quite conscious indeed.
Its always funny to me in these kinds of threads when people are like “Me? Unconsciously biased?!? Nonsense!”.
They *know* they’re biased, but being offered the chance the chance to examine their own assumptions triggers so much doxastic anxiety that they instantly reject it.
I mean, so many in that party come across as soulless automata, acts of ignoring human emotions like this don’t really surprise me.
They are completely conscious of what they are doing
To be fair it is pointless to do this in the conservative party where bias is deliberate and to a large extent conscious. They know it hurts, that’s what they like. As well to offer hospitality training to the Borgias. It’s not an accident.
This is obviously being framed in the context of the woke wars but has there been any evidence unconscious bias training actually changes it ?
Just seems like a tick box exercise out of silicon valley by the money men. It seems we like idea of it working or being effective regardless of whether it is.
“I’m not aware of having any unconscious bias so I don’t need a training course” – The people currently running this shitshow of a country.
The questionnaire / test after the training I had to do at the university was biased: the first half of the questions conditioned you and tired out your brain, and the second half brought the ‘unconscious bias’ results. You could have any results by changing the order of the questions.
It’s bs now , before it was everyone has bias towards people like themselves , which is probably true , and we should try to be aware of that and mitigate that bias for ourselves to be fair to everyone
if your saying its only one group doing it and it only matters if one group does it , its bs
The tories are bitching about “woke” people and trans people at the moment. They have no business claiming something is divisive nonsense
I’m waiting for a rehash of that 1964 election leaflet from a Tory candidate.
Not all who vote Tory are racists but…
But unconscious bias training has been shown to be inadequate for addressing bias. It doesn’t actually make people address their bias.
It is, 100%, designed to reduce litigation risks.
There is quite a bit of evidence that such training is useless and very rarely encourages any sort of behavioural change.
There’s even some decent evidence that it can make problems worse, as the types of people who really need help rebel against it.
Unconscious bias training is, in my experience, largely pointless. Most people who are going to be receptive to it are already aware that they have unhelpful biases, like thinking negative thoughts about fat people or feeling more uncomfortable around black teens than white teens or whatever it might be, and they don’t learn much from it. Those who aren’t receptive have the Tory view of either “what a load of nonsense, I don’t have unconscious bias” or, as one former colleague who used to work for the Met said, “I just have to pick the answer that’s the opposite of what I believe, it’s like 1984 trying to force these beliefs on me”.
Im sure there’s a few people who had just never came across the concept before and were open to it and did learn something, but I think the majority either already know it so get nothing out of it or completely reject it as woke bullshit so get nothing out of it. It ultimately is an arse covering exercise (like all health and safety type training) so that if someone is racist in the workplace they can turn around and go “but you did the ‘dont be a racist’ training so it’s not our fault.”
If its unconscious bias – that means you dont even know you have it. How do you train people to not have somthing whitch they dont even know if they have? Do you assume they have it and then train them to not have somthing whitch they might not have?
The Conservatives: “We don’t need to know about unconscious bias, we already know we hate poor people, Jeremy Corbyn, refugees, public services, the NHS, immigrants, trans folk, the gays when we feel like it, why don’t everyone else do the same?”
Going to have to back the tories on this one unfortunately. Unconscious bias is the most ridiculous woke nonsense out there it just a way for leftists to blame certain things on discrimination without proof. Can’t prove it by statistics? Must be unconscious bias.
Unconscious bias aka blatant ignorance.
Never met anyone who went into unconscious bias training a total racist and came out somehow transformed into a wokey.
I did one of these unconscious bias courses at a US company. Including the pre test and actual test.
I came out pretty much in the middle ground.
I was interested in how it all worked and asked if I could take it again, they said it wasn’t allowed, and got immediately shirty with me for even asking, suggesting I wanted to ‘game the system’.
Struck me as an odd way to speak to a client’s employee.
I’m a very polite person, and the reaction was a bit extreme.
Back at the hotel I had a google. Seemingly they don’t let you repeat tests as the outcomes are always vastly different.
Not necessarily better nor worse, just never the same.
My IQ tests, reasoning, and personality tests have been consistent across the years and across companies.
Struck me as pretty worrying and very unscientific that a valuable test could have such varied and unrepeatable qresults.
Led me to the conclusion that the whole thing was a US corporate box ticking excercise rather than a real attempt at change.
That’s my view anyway
I raise my glass to people that sell this ‘training’ and earn bags for it. What a hilarious state we’ve got ourselves in. I’m actually envious I didn’t go down that route myself.
Funny how they sweep this sjw pandering under the rug when it’s their own workplace but they won’t come out and wipe this from our workplaces.
I don’t know if it’s anywhere similar but I did a course that was named similar and sounded similar as a routine thing for a precious job a few years ago.
I don’t know if it was the material or the trainer but it came off as some of the most weirdly racist stuff I’ve ever seen in my professional life.
Aka racist in a talking down about minorities thing.
If I had gone to Eton and was as out of touch as the average politician, I can’t imagine how I’d have come out of that. Probably atleast see myself as a “white saviour”.
they should have said positive discrimination… for real will they never learn.
I’d like to go on one of these courses but only out of morbid curiosity
Doesn’t it make people more offensive because they’re now overthinking about how not to be offensive and inevitably doing/saying something they wouldn’t normally?
They don’t need to do training about unconscious bias, they’re bias enough when conscious
Divisive nonsense is basically their mission statement
Best thing they’ve done in ages. These courses are nonsense to the extreme. Sit down and do one in your own time and marvel at the mental gymnastics you have to perform to arrive at the desired answer.
Unconscious bias is nonsense. The idea that you can change unconscious behaviour is laughable.
My office is in the middle of putting everyone through these courses. I can confirm that they are totally bullshit.
The party is full of whackos. I know cos I’m a member and I don’t go to any events anymore cos honestly everyone is nuts
I don’t think there is any point of unconscious bias training anywhere – normally it’s a annual mandatory ‘course’ with 45-60 mins of recordings to watch then click to the test as quick as possible….. the certificate then gets filed away and is used as a means to sack you if you do something wrong. A paper exercise that means nothing.
Good. Its utterly stupid and a complete waste of time and effort.
Honestly, ‘*divisive nonsense’* sounds like a conclusion someone suffering from unconscious bias would come to.
Sounds to me like the subject matter hit a little too close to home.
Wow, turns out people don’t like to be told they’re racist and homophobic! Who knew?!
While unconscious bias is a huge deal, and I’d wager plenty of politicians, supporters and activists on both sides of the aisle could really do with addressing theirs, as someone who has had to sit through these courses at many different companies in two different countries, most of them are just utterly condescending, boring and not really educational.
Therre’s a comment in this thread from a guy mentioning a finance talk where the presenter tells people how their unconscious biases might be affecting their day to day life, and costing them money. That sounds interesting, useful and engaging, but repeatedly hitting tickboxes about pretend cartoon characters on a screen that you’ve read three sentences about is none of those things.
It takes a tremendous amount of empathy to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Never-mind the empathy required to do something to help. It is literally their job to do this. That is the problem.
45 comments
Does anyone have experience with these courses? I’m all for them in theory but I’m skeptical they’d ever be particularly effective
Sounds like a good idea in all honesty. Why hold such courses when you are clearly not going to engage with the subject matter with sincerity? The course itself may have some issues, however those are meaningless if the Tories have no intention of fixing their unconscious biases to begin with. You cannot change people who do not want to change and it is clear that unconscious biases are something the Conservatives are happy to conserve.
They really do love to revel in their ignorance don’t they. Can’t risk learning something new and growing as a person .
Without knowing the contents of the course, it’s impossible to make any judgement.
Saying that, I don’t think unconscious bias is a worry for them, most of them wear their prejudice on their sleeve, nice and open.
These courses are dangerous. I know someone who is on the autistic spectrum and had such a training. She needed some works done in the house and hired someone that was totally off, but she didn’t want to appear biased or have her “prejudice” deprive someone of the job. As she explained, she took everything literally from that course and she thought that the alarm bells was just her biases, so she decided to ignore them.
Well, he scammed her out of a couple of grand and work had to be redone.
Not surprised. [They’ve already been proven to be guilty of it](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13540688211021053)
>We send short email requests to 10,268 local government representatives from each of the main political parties, from stereotypically Islamic, Jewish, and Christian names. Response rates are six to seven percentage points lower to stereotypically Muslim or Jewish names. The two major political parties both show equal bias towards the two minority group names. Results suggest that the bias in response may be implicit
But of course, Heaven forbid they might engage in anything that might grant them some level of self awareness.
Honestly there is probably no point of unconscious bias training in the conservative party given that they seem to be completely fine with 100% conscious bias.
Good. Having taken several of these courses myself they’re nothing but an expensive arse covering exercise filled with critical theory nonsense.
I’ve trained these courses in my career and as others have posted, they’re as useful as the people taking them want them to be.
But I’ve gotta be honest, the one thing I’ve taken away from it all is that most biases are quite conscious indeed.
Its always funny to me in these kinds of threads when people are like “Me? Unconsciously biased?!? Nonsense!”.
They *know* they’re biased, but being offered the chance the chance to examine their own assumptions triggers so much doxastic anxiety that they instantly reject it.
I mean, so many in that party come across as soulless automata, acts of ignoring human emotions like this don’t really surprise me.
They are completely conscious of what they are doing
To be fair it is pointless to do this in the conservative party where bias is deliberate and to a large extent conscious. They know it hurts, that’s what they like. As well to offer hospitality training to the Borgias. It’s not an accident.
This is obviously being framed in the context of the woke wars but has there been any evidence unconscious bias training actually changes it ?
Just seems like a tick box exercise out of silicon valley by the money men. It seems we like idea of it working or being effective regardless of whether it is.
“I’m not aware of having any unconscious bias so I don’t need a training course” – The people currently running this shitshow of a country.
The questionnaire / test after the training I had to do at the university was biased: the first half of the questions conditioned you and tired out your brain, and the second half brought the ‘unconscious bias’ results. You could have any results by changing the order of the questions.
It’s bs now , before it was everyone has bias towards people like themselves , which is probably true , and we should try to be aware of that and mitigate that bias for ourselves to be fair to everyone
if your saying its only one group doing it and it only matters if one group does it , its bs
The tories are bitching about “woke” people and trans people at the moment. They have no business claiming something is divisive nonsense
I’m waiting for a rehash of that 1964 election leaflet from a Tory candidate.
Not all who vote Tory are racists but…
But unconscious bias training has been shown to be inadequate for addressing bias. It doesn’t actually make people address their bias.
It is, 100%, designed to reduce litigation risks.
There is quite a bit of evidence that such training is useless and very rarely encourages any sort of behavioural change.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0950017017719841?journalCode=wesa
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/rabble-rouser/202106/is-implicit-bias-training-useless?amp
There’s even some decent evidence that it can make problems worse, as the types of people who really need help rebel against it.
Unconscious bias training is, in my experience, largely pointless. Most people who are going to be receptive to it are already aware that they have unhelpful biases, like thinking negative thoughts about fat people or feeling more uncomfortable around black teens than white teens or whatever it might be, and they don’t learn much from it. Those who aren’t receptive have the Tory view of either “what a load of nonsense, I don’t have unconscious bias” or, as one former colleague who used to work for the Met said, “I just have to pick the answer that’s the opposite of what I believe, it’s like 1984 trying to force these beliefs on me”.
Im sure there’s a few people who had just never came across the concept before and were open to it and did learn something, but I think the majority either already know it so get nothing out of it or completely reject it as woke bullshit so get nothing out of it. It ultimately is an arse covering exercise (like all health and safety type training) so that if someone is racist in the workplace they can turn around and go “but you did the ‘dont be a racist’ training so it’s not our fault.”
If its unconscious bias – that means you dont even know you have it. How do you train people to not have somthing whitch they dont even know if they have? Do you assume they have it and then train them to not have somthing whitch they might not have?
The Conservatives: “We don’t need to know about unconscious bias, we already know we hate poor people, Jeremy Corbyn, refugees, public services, the NHS, immigrants, trans folk, the gays when we feel like it, why don’t everyone else do the same?”
Going to have to back the tories on this one unfortunately. Unconscious bias is the most ridiculous woke nonsense out there it just a way for leftists to blame certain things on discrimination without proof. Can’t prove it by statistics? Must be unconscious bias.
Unconscious bias aka blatant ignorance.
Never met anyone who went into unconscious bias training a total racist and came out somehow transformed into a wokey.
I did one of these unconscious bias courses at a US company. Including the pre test and actual test.
I came out pretty much in the middle ground.
I was interested in how it all worked and asked if I could take it again, they said it wasn’t allowed, and got immediately shirty with me for even asking, suggesting I wanted to ‘game the system’.
Struck me as an odd way to speak to a client’s employee.
I’m a very polite person, and the reaction was a bit extreme.
Back at the hotel I had a google. Seemingly they don’t let you repeat tests as the outcomes are always vastly different.
Not necessarily better nor worse, just never the same.
My IQ tests, reasoning, and personality tests have been consistent across the years and across companies.
Struck me as pretty worrying and very unscientific that a valuable test could have such varied and unrepeatable qresults.
Led me to the conclusion that the whole thing was a US corporate box ticking excercise rather than a real attempt at change.
That’s my view anyway
I raise my glass to people that sell this ‘training’ and earn bags for it. What a hilarious state we’ve got ourselves in. I’m actually envious I didn’t go down that route myself.
Funny how they sweep this sjw pandering under the rug when it’s their own workplace but they won’t come out and wipe this from our workplaces.
I don’t know if it’s anywhere similar but I did a course that was named similar and sounded similar as a routine thing for a precious job a few years ago.
I don’t know if it was the material or the trainer but it came off as some of the most weirdly racist stuff I’ve ever seen in my professional life.
Aka racist in a talking down about minorities thing.
If I had gone to Eton and was as out of touch as the average politician, I can’t imagine how I’d have come out of that. Probably atleast see myself as a “white saviour”.
they should have said positive discrimination… for real will they never learn.
I’d like to go on one of these courses but only out of morbid curiosity
Doesn’t it make people more offensive because they’re now overthinking about how not to be offensive and inevitably doing/saying something they wouldn’t normally?
They don’t need to do training about unconscious bias, they’re bias enough when conscious
Divisive nonsense is basically their mission statement
Best thing they’ve done in ages. These courses are nonsense to the extreme. Sit down and do one in your own time and marvel at the mental gymnastics you have to perform to arrive at the desired answer.
Unconscious bias is nonsense. The idea that you can change unconscious behaviour is laughable.
My office is in the middle of putting everyone through these courses. I can confirm that they are totally bullshit.
The party is full of whackos. I know cos I’m a member and I don’t go to any events anymore cos honestly everyone is nuts
I don’t think there is any point of unconscious bias training anywhere – normally it’s a annual mandatory ‘course’ with 45-60 mins of recordings to watch then click to the test as quick as possible….. the certificate then gets filed away and is used as a means to sack you if you do something wrong. A paper exercise that means nothing.
Good. Its utterly stupid and a complete waste of time and effort.
Honestly, ‘*divisive nonsense’* sounds like a conclusion someone suffering from unconscious bias would come to.
Sounds to me like the subject matter hit a little too close to home.
Wow, turns out people don’t like to be told they’re racist and homophobic! Who knew?!
While unconscious bias is a huge deal, and I’d wager plenty of politicians, supporters and activists on both sides of the aisle could really do with addressing theirs, as someone who has had to sit through these courses at many different companies in two different countries, most of them are just utterly condescending, boring and not really educational.
Therre’s a comment in this thread from a guy mentioning a finance talk where the presenter tells people how their unconscious biases might be affecting their day to day life, and costing them money. That sounds interesting, useful and engaging, but repeatedly hitting tickboxes about pretend cartoon characters on a screen that you’ve read three sentences about is none of those things.
It takes a tremendous amount of empathy to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Never-mind the empathy required to do something to help. It is literally their job to do this. That is the problem.