Let’s Talk About Race: Bias as a Barrier

The first time learners use Bodyswaps, this onboarding sequence familiarises them with the features of the app, takes them through an avatar selection and embodiment activity, and prepares them for the experience to come. 

During the induction, learners will: 

• Find out how this training is different from the rest
• Select their avatar
• Discover their virtual journal
• Learn how to navigate and use the tools and settings

The module begins with the ‘Surgeon’s Dilemma’ - a story designed to challenge biased thought patterns: 

“A father and son are involved in a car accident. The father is killed and the son rushed to hospital for emergency surgery. Upon seeing the patient, the attending surgeon says, “I can’t operate on this patient, this is my son!”

The learner listens to the story and then, in their own words, answers the question ‘Who is the surgeon?’ Feedback indicates whether any bias was implicit in their words. 

The coaches then introduce the themes that will be addressed within the module and invite the learner to complete a short likert-style self-reflection survey to indicate how confident they feel about the following key learning points:

• Being aware of the role of unconscious bias in your own thoughts and behaviours
• Understanding how your life is impacted by other people’s bias
• Critically examining bias in popular media
• Detecting and overriding your own bias

These self-reflection questions will be repeated in the debrief at the end, to assess how the learner’s confidence levels have changed.

Note: If you wish to receive data about how the learner’s confidence levels have changed as a consequence of the training, it’s important that they complete this introduction and the debrief at the end. 

Nola introduces the notion that everyone has bias. She invites Abeeku and the learner to close their eyes and picture a scenario while she talks about it. 

While the learner listens, Nola describes a flight she recently took to visit her brother in the States. She talks about some of the people she met: 

• A honeymoon couple
• The pilot
• Flight attendants
• A fellow passenger
• An immigration officer

Afterwards, the two coaches light-heartedly compare Abeeku’s mental picture of those people with Nola’s actual experience. This allows us to address some common biases in a non-confrontational way, bringing awareness to what some of these biases might be without making the learner feel set up. 

The coaches then discuss how things like upbringing, social circles and the media all contribute to unconscious bias. They explain that it’s not wrong to have bias, but it is wrong to allow that bias to cloud our judgement or impact upon others. To protect against this, we need to be vigilant and take conscious efforts to challenge automatic assumptions.

Learners now move on to an empathy-building activity that explores their learner’s own experience of bias. 

Here, the virtual coaches ask the learner to think back to when they were teenagers and answer questions about how older people’s bias may have impacted attitudes around:

• Trust
• Respect
• Competence

Tailored feedback highlights how much the learner’s teenage years were affected by age-related bias. The coaches go on to point out that young people often experience biases from those older than them and thankfully it’s something that can change as you get older. But what if the bias you experience is based on something that doesn’t change, like skin colour? Unless we address those kinds of bias, the discrimination will never end!

In this observation activity, we help the learner to look beneath the surface of some common racial biases and reflect on their own bias with the help of Brandon and Faye. 

The friends are discussing their favourite TV show. The second series streamed last night and, while Faye loved it, Brandon, who has Chinese heritage, has issues with some of the new characters because the script is filled with lazy stereotypes and cliched tropes that marginalise Asian people, including:

• Asian store owner
• Interchangeable Asian cultures
• ‘Funny’ accent
• All Asians look the same
• Model minority
• All Asians know martial arts

The learner’s task is to listen to the conversation and click or tap to indicate instances of stereotypes. 

Visual feedback is given in real time to show if the learner has correctly identified a stereotype and summary feedback is supplied at the end of the conversation, with a panel of buttons indicating which events were identified. Clicking on a button rewinds the animation to the corresponding instance and provides additional text information about its significance.   

Finally, Brandon explains that Asian characters in movies are often created by people who aren’t themselves Asian. Tropes like the ones seen in the activity create unconscious biases that marginalise Asian communities, giving non-Asians unrealistic notions of what Asian people are like and estranging Asians themselves by projecting an unrepresentative model of their ethnicity, which most don’t identify with.

The virtual coaches explain that, unless you are a member of a group that is commonly stereotyped, you might not be aware of the way that common tropes in society bias your own thinking, which is why it’s important to challenge your own assumptions from time to time. 

In this activity, they introduce a four-part strategy for detecting and overriding biased thinking, illustrated with an example of a time when Nola felt uncomfortable when a young Black male in a hoodie arrived at a basketball court where she and a girlfriend were shooting some hoops. 

The strategy involves: 

Step 1 - STOP
Was I thinking fast or slow? 

Step 2 - SWITCH
Try to see it from the other person’s perspective

Step 3 - CHALLENGE
Attributes or situation 

Step 4 - COUNTER
Say something that contradicts your bias

Having been introduced to the strategy, users practise applying it in a scaffolded conversation with Nola and Abeeku. Each time a character speaks, the learner chooses how to respond from three given options. Each option elicits a different response from Nola and / or Abeeku and a pop-up containing additional information, if required, about why it was or wasn’t the best option. 

If the learner selects an inappropriate option, after receiving feedback, they get to try again. This repeats until the learner selects the best option. There is no penalty for selecting an inappropriate response. Instead, learners are encouraged to experiment and perhaps voice internally held opinions that they usually suppress for fear of reprisals in order to see what the outcome might be.   

Finally, learners are given the power to monitor and challenge their own bias in a self-counselling activity in which the learner is encouraged to reflect on situations when they have acted with bias. 

For example:

• The first time you met someone of a particular race
• Feeling uncomfortable around someone from the LGTBQ2S+ Community
• Making fun of somebody who acted differently from ‘the norm’
• Thinking that a victim of violence had somehow ‘asked for it’

The learner speaks aloud, describing the situation to Faye and Nola. 

The learner then switches bodies with Faye and listens to their own avatar repeating their bias statements back to them, before switching back and using the four-step strategy to challenge their own biased thinking patterns.

Nola is on hand to help the learner, if they wish, by demonstrating how she would use the strategy to challenge her own biased behaviour (from the scenario she described in the previous activity) before they speak. 

The coaches congratulate the learner on completing the Bias as a Barrier training and acknowledge that experiences like this can be uncomfortable, but that’s why it’s so important to consciously build awareness of your own bias so that you can challenge and counter them.  

They are then invited to repeat the likert survey from the beginning of the activity, to encourage them to reflect and self-report on how their confidence levels have changed following completion of the training with respect to: 

• Being aware of the role of unconscious bias in your own thoughts and behaviours
• Understanding how your life is impacted by other people’s bias
• Critically examining bias in popular media
• Detecting and overriding your own bias

Before the learner leaves the module, they are asked to complete a short survey about their experience. 

This survey is not compulsory, but the data helps us to assess the effectiveness of our product and identify any areas that need improvement. Clients also find it beneficial when assessing ROI. 

They are asked to mark whether they agree or disagree with the following statements, on a 10 point scale: 

• I would recommend this experience to others 
• The experience helped me identify elements I could improve upon
• I have a better understanding of racial biases and unconscious biases