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Recently on PBS Newshour there was a segment about Silicon Valley and their attempts to hire more diverse employees. A focus of the segment was employee training seminars about unconscious biases--where employees do exercises in order to make themselves more aware and careful about these biases.

Studies I've read have demonstrated that racial stereotyping is very real and very instantaneous--and exists among people of all races. But is there any scientific support for these classes being effective in reducing this unconscious bias?

Eric Auld
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    It would be good to link to some of these classes to see what they claim. I would guess they don't claim to reduce unconscious racial bias, but give tools to help consciously overcome that bias, making the question title slightly inaccurate. – Oddthinking Jan 17 '16 at 13:06
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    I'm guessing the line of thought here involves feedback - if you're taught to recognize when you're unconsciously applying stereotypes, you can stop yourself from *acting* on them quite so often. – Shadur Jan 21 '16 at 10:14
  • @Shadur Agreed. You couldn't use instantaneous reactions to demonstrate the effectiveness of the classes. – Eric Auld Jan 21 '16 at 19:00
  • You need to feed them anti racist propaganda. Do it for a month and the results will be nice if done correctly. – Sakib Arifin Mar 11 '17 at 16:32
  • this is related https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/41176/is-the-implicit-association-test-effective-at-determining-an-individuals-biases – Calvin Khor Oct 18 '19 at 11:38

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