[MUSIC PLAYING]
LILY JAMPOL: So I want to ask you guys a question.
Do you-- yes or no-- consider yourselves, generally speaking,
to be nice?
A nice person?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
LILY JAMPOL: Yes.
Of course you are.
[LAUGHS] Now I'm going to upset you
by telling you about how sometimes being nice
can have unintended and ironic consequences for the workplace.
So in the 2009 film "Up in the Air,"
George Clooney plays a character who is hired by other companies
to go and fire their employees so
that they don't have to do it.
Besides being a pretty good film,
what the plot captures perfectly is
that giving feedback to others is pretty terrible for everyone
involved, especially if it's negative feedback.
In fact, research has found that supervisors
will delay giving feedback, not give it at all,
or even distort the contents of that feedback
so that it's not quite as harsh.
What we know as white lies.
And this tension between truthfulness but also
not wanting to hurt people's feelings
can be exacerbated when the recipient of that feedback
is particularly empathy-eliciting.
And historically speaking, women have stereotypically
been seen to be less competent than men
but also more emotionally unstable and vulnerable.
And these beliefs, despite being often subconscious or implicit,
can lead to protective or sometimes even patronizing
attitudes and behaviors towards women.
So my question was, if it's hard to give feedback
and women are seen with more empathy,
does that mean that women are going
to be told more white lies about their performance than men?
And in order to test this question,
we put people in a situation that
would mimic this tension between truthfulness and empathy.
And we asked them to give feedback directly
to some other participants.
So we told our participants that they
were going to be working remotely
with two other students, who we identified as AM and SB,
and who were, unbeknownst to them,
actually computer-generated programs.
So they weren't real participants.
And we asked them to evaluate essays
that AM and SB had written and evaluate them on a 0
to 100 scale and tell us what they thought
about these particular essays.
So this is phase one.
Once they had submitted those ratings to us, in phase two,
we told them, now you're gonna have a chance
to give feedback directly to these other students.
And this time, we had the other fake students
introduce themselves using their real names, Andrew and Sarah,
which we used as a subtle manipulation of gender.
So now they were both assigned genders.
And then we asked the participants to rate
the essays again using the exact same scale
as they had before, only this time they
would submit those ratings directly to the participants.
And then we measured the degree of white lie
by taking the difference between phase two and phase one.
And what we found is despite there being
no difference in the phase one ratings-- that is,
before they knew the gender, people were rating equally bad
the essays, about 35% on a 100% scale.
In phase two, people were telling Sarah
that she was doing more than 15% better than they had told us
they thought she was doing, indicating
that at least to some degree, Sarah was getting white lies.
And we've replicated this in other studies since then.
And we also asked people, did you
know that you lied more to Sarah than to Andrew?
And people at least reported that they
had no recollection of having given biased feedback to one
participant over the other.
All right.
So this isn't necessarily a problem
if women actually do prefer hearing white lies, right?
[LAUGHTER]
Well, you could argue that that is a problem.
But in a follow-up study, we decided to ask them,
do you prefer hearing white lies?
And we asked both women and men.
It turns out that no, everybody actually expressed a preference
for hearing the truth.
So at least on a nominal level, people
desire to hear truthful feedback, even if it was harsh.
Now it seems that women are being
told more white lies than men.
But there are other broader implications
of this besides just this incongruency problem.
First and foremost, a lack of information
means that women-- and possibly other disadvantaged groups--
are not getting the information that they need in order
to improve.
And if they do detect that supervisors are lying,
this could also lead to resentment and demotivation.
And all this has implications not just
for individual performance but also for the performance
of the workplace and the organizations.
And I have to thank Nancy for teaching me
how to draw hair on stick figures using PowerPoint.
It's pretty awesome.
All right.
So what can we do?
What are some practical interventions?
First and foremost, and this has been
brought up a bit with the conversation
on subconscious bias, but increasing awareness
is really important.
Particularly important is having everyone, both employees
and employers, understand that good people
with good or chivalrous intentions
can have ironic consequences for equality in the workplace.
Secondly, some practical interventions we could do
would be to have employees ask for truthful feedback.
So in feedback situations, this might alleviate the pressure
there is on supervisors to be nice instead of be truthful.
And likewise, supervisors could prompt employees
to express their preferences during those feedback
situations.
Another action that could be taken
is to have supervisors concentrate on the broader
goals of the organization and the concrete improvements
that employees could make, given truthful feedback.
And not just on avoiding negative interactions
with people when they're face to face with them.
Also we've found that people who've had experience
giving feedback tend to show this bias a little bit less.
So perhaps running simulations or training programs,
putting supervisors in a series of being
able to deal with different kinds of feedback situations
would more adequately prepare them
to be able to give unbiased feedback.
Ultimately, there's been a lot of progress
in terms of equality.
However, the glass ceiling still exists
for women in the workplace.
Making broad structural changes, such as maternity care,
are really important and necessary steps.
However, understanding how biases-- subtle ones,
like the one that I've just shown you-- play out
through common and normal workplace routines
is also really, really essential.
It's not just for breaking down those barriers
and identifying these biases, but also
for developing interventions that
will make the workplace a more equal and hospitable place
for everyone.
Thanks.
[APPLAUSE]
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