Finally Some Robust Research Into Whether “Diversity Training” Actually Works – Unfortunately It’s Not Very Promising

Diversity trainings are big business. In the United States, companies spend about £6.1 billion per year, by one estimate, on programmes geared at making companies more inclusive and welcoming to members of often-underrepresented groups (British numbers aren’t easy to come by, but according to one recent survey, over a third of recruiters are planning to increase their investment in diversity initiatives).




Unfortunately, there’s little evidence-backed consensus about which sorts of diversity programmes work, and why, and there have been long-standing concerns in some quarters that these programmes don’t do much at all, or that they could actually be harmful. In part because of this dearth of evidence, the market for pro-diversity interventions is a bit of a Wild West with regard to quality.




For a new paper in PNAS, a prominent team of researchers, including Katherine Milkman, Angela Duckworth, and Adam Grant of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, partnered with a large global organisation to measure the real-world impact of the researchers’ own anti-bias intervention, designed principally to “promote inclusive attitudes and behaviors toward women, whereas a secondary focus was to promote the inclusion of other underrepresented groups (e.g., racial minorities).” The results were mixed at best – and unfortunately there are good reasons to be sceptical that even the more positive results are as positive as they seem.







The company in question emailed 10,983 employees, inviting them to “complete a new inclusive leadership workplace training,” as the researchers sum it up. Out of those, 3,016 employees, 38.5 per cent of them American, answered the call and were assigned, in thirds, either to one of two online treatment groups or to a control group.




“In the gender-bias and general-bias trainings,” write the researchers, “participants learned about the psychological processes that underlie stereotyping and research that shows how stereotyping can result in bias and inequity in the workplace, completed and received feedback on an Implicit Association Test assessing their associations between gender and career-oriented words, and learned about strategies to overcome stereotyping in the workplace.” There was little difference between the so-called gender-bias and general-bias trainings, except for minor points of emphasis, and the researchers ended up collapsing them into one training condition, comparing the results to those in a control group who received a “stylistically similar training, but [with a focus on] psychological safety and active listening rather than stereotyping.” On average, the bias training took 68 minutes to complete, and was evaluated on the basis of responses to an attitudes questionnaire and real-world behavioural data taken up to 20 weeks post-intervention.




The key chart summarising all the researchers’ findings is shown at the top of this post. One thing that immediately jumps out is that the top row, which deals with attitudes, shows more impressive results than the bottom row, which deals with actual behavior (though even the top-row results are modest in terms of the size of their effect). But in looking at the attitudinal measures the researchers used, critical readers might fairly wonder whether they’re really measuring what they are supposed to be measuring – i.e. support for women in the workplace.




For example, the “attitudinal support for women” score was drawn from levels of (dis)agreement with items like “Discrimination against women is no longer a problem” and “Society has reached the point where women and men have equal opportunities for achievement.” But arguably, whether an individual believes equality has already been accomplished is different from whether they believe that women should be fully supported in the workplace. Someone can believe that discrimination against women is no longer a problem but still believe they should be treated in exactly the same way as men. These questionnaire statements seem to be more geared at measuring political liberalism or conservatism with regard to gender issues than misogynist attitudes directly. So the risk, then, is that the training successfully increases political liberalism (to a modest degree), but it’s not possible to tell from the questionnaire items whether it alters the kind of attitudes that are likely to more directly underlie discriminatory behaviour.




Arguably, there is also a problem with the “gender-bias acknowledgment” result, which was based on those participants in the training group admitting (more than the control participants) to having gender biases more similar to the average person. This finding is complicated by the fact that the bias training involved taking the gender-bias Implicit Association Test (IAT). Setting aside the other well-documented problems with the IAT, the gender IAT, in particular, has produced some strange results. As this chart from FiveThirtyEight showed in 2017, the normal “pattern” of IATs relating to minority or marginalised groups – in which conservatives (and members of majority groups) tend to score higher for implicit bias toward such groups than liberals (and members of minority groups) – is more or less reversed when it comes to the gender-bias IAT:




bialik-gender-1.png




Specifically, results from the gender IAT suggest that women are more implicitly biased against women than men are, that this is the case at every point on the political spectrum, and that within many subgroups, political liberals are more biased against women than conservatives.




Setting aside these questionable patterns, a lot of people in the bias-training condition were likely told they were biased by their IAT result. So when they subsequently filled out a questionnaire asking them to gauge their level of anti-woman bias, were they simply echoing what a dubious test told them? It certainly seems like a possibility, and if so, should that count as an ethical, successful educational intervention?




Meanwhile, the behavioral results (based on participants’ choices of who to mentor, which new hires to speak to, and colleagues’ excellence to recognise) were far less impressive than the attitudinal ones. A lot of the effects were clustered right around zero and/or differed greatly on the basis of sex or nationality (which isn’t a good sign for programmes that are designed to be delivered to large, diverse groups of employees). The biggest effect involved an email invitation, 14 weeks after follow-up, to talk on the phone with either a male or a female new hire. There was no overall effect, but among women only, those in the bias-training group were more likely, at a statistically significant level, than those in the control condition, to agree to talk to newly hired women than men.




Where does all this leave us? It’s hard to say. The results definitely weren’t impressive, and the strongest came from questionable attitude measures and, potentially, participants’ responses to a controversial test of implicit bias. This outcome shouldn’t be too surprising: if you surveyed psychologists and asked them whether a single, 68-minute training could generate sizable behavioural effects weeks and months later, most would probably tell you no. Behaviour change is hard. Plus, even the modest results seen here were for employees who volunteered to take part, rather than a random sample. Yet diversity trainings, at their best, will have a positive effect on the general population of a company or institution, not just those who express a desire to take part.




That said, setting aside quibbles with this particular evaluation and programme, this study is laudable for showing exactly how diversity programmes should be evaluated: with an eye toward behavioural outcomes measured a significant period of time after the programme itself is delivered. Until there are more studies like this one, those who want to use diversity training to make companies and other institutions more welcoming have no option but to feel around in the dark for what works.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/04/10/finally-some-research-into-whether-diversity-training-actually-works-unfortunately-its-not-very-promising/#more-36889(accessed 23.4.19)

People Who Use More Happy Words Are Not Necessarily Happier – An Awkward Finding For Language-based Emotion Research

The age of social media has opened up exciting opportunities for researchers to investigate people’s emotional states on a massive scale. For example, one study found that tweets contain more positive emotional words in the morning, which was interpreted as showing that most people are in a better mood at that time of day.

The premise of this line of research is that our word choices reflect our psychological states – that if someone uses more positive or negative emotional words, this is a good indication that they are actually experiencing those emotions. But now a new study has thrown a spanner in the works, finding that – for spoken language at least – this assumption might not hold up. In their preprint posted recently on PsyArxiv, Jessie Sun and colleagues found that emotion-related words do not in fact provide a good indication of a person’s mood, although there may be other sets of words that do.



Sun’s team asked 185 American university students to wear a recording device for a week, which recorded a 30 second snippet of sound every 9.5 minutes. Four times per day, the participants also completed a survey via text message measuring the positive and negative emotions they had experienced over the previous hour.

The team ended up with a whopping 150,000 recordings, which research assistants transcribed over the course of two years, weeding out clips which contained no speech or just a few words. They then scored each recording according to how many positive and negative emotion words it contained (like “sweet” or “hurt”), by running the text through an analysis programme called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count , which contains dictionaries of words associated with different topics. Finally, the team averaged the scores for all clips from the same three-hour period surrounding each questionnaire, ending up with 1,579 language-based emotion measurements that they could directly compare to participants’ self-reported mood.

The researchers found that – contrary to the assumptions of some past studies – the number of positive and negative emotional words was not associated with participants’ actual mood. “Our findings suggest that researchers should not assume that fluctuations in … [the use of emotional words] … can be used as a proxy for subjective emotion experience, at least for spoken language”, the authors write.

But the recordings did contain some emotional information: the research assistants’ assessment of the speaker’s emotions, based on listening to the recordings, was associated with participants’ rating of their own mood. The authors suggest that the human raters were picking up on non-verbal cues relating to emotion – things like intonation and volume – that the programme itself was missing.

In an exploratory analysis, the authors also examined whether any other sets of words unrelated to emotion could predict participants’ mood. They found that greater use of words related to socialising, like “you” or “we”, was associated with experiencing more positive emotion, while use of maths words, like “minus” and “number”, was related to less positive emotion. However, these associations were weak, so may not be useful measures of emotion, say the authors.

There are other possible explanations for the null results in the study, which the authors acknowledge. It could be that a person’s use of emotion-related words taps into an aspect of emotion that also isn’t captured by self-report questionnaires – perhaps one that participants themselves aren’t consciously aware of. Alternatively, the dictionaries themselves may not always reflect how people use words: for example, the word “pretty” appears in the positive dictionary, but could be used in a negative context (e.g. “it was pretty terrible”). But even taking into account these limitations, the new study demonstrates the importance of checking the validity of tools in psychology research, to make sure that they are actually measuring what we think they are measuring.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/03/29/people-who-use-more-happy-words-are-not-necessarily-happier-an-awkward-finding-for-language-based-emotion-research/#more-36796(accessed 23.4.19)

First Study To Explore What It’s Like To Live With Avoidant Personality Disorder: “Safe When Alone, Yet Lost In Their Aloneness”

In the first study of its kind, researchers have asked people to describe in their own words what it’s like to live with Avoidant Personality Disorder (AVPD) – a diagnosis defined by psychiatrists as “a pervasive pattern of social inhibition, feelings of inadequacy, and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation”. Like all personality disorder diagnoses, AVPD is controversial, with some critics questioning whether it is anything other than an extreme form of social phobia.

To shed new light on the issue, lead author Kristine D. Sørensen, a psychologist, twice interviewed 15 people receiving outpatient treatment for AVPD: 9 women, 6 men, with an average age of 33, and none of them in work. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, Sørensen and her colleagues said the overarching theme to emerge from the in-depth interviews was the participants’ struggle to be a person. “They felt safe when alone yet lost in their aloneness,” the researchers said. They “longed to connect with others yet feared to get close.” In the researchers’ opinion, the participants’ profound difficulties with their “core self” and in their dealings with others do indeed correspond to “a personality disorder diagnosis”.



Beneath the overarching theme of struggling to be a person, there emerged two main themes, the first being “fear and longing“. This included participants’ descriptions of having to put on a mask when socialising and their difficulty feeling normal. “I notice that you spend incredible amounts of energy. You just spend your entire consciousness in just not … trying not to make a fool out of yourself and appear normal.” (Steve). This constant performance meant they felt other people never really knew them. “I have never felt seen. Not even my mother knew me like that. I know I have missed it. I never felt loved.” (Lily). There were some rare exceptions to these difficulties. For instance, one participant said they felt authentic when with their young daughter, yet other participants described how, as their children grew older, their usual insecurities returned even when in their company.

Another difficulty that was mentioned repeatedly was the dread of getting close to others. “I am very, very suspicious of people. Not that they would harm me physically, but what are their intentions? Or they seem nice, but really, they are not.” (Eva). Coping measures included only interacting through email or text message, and when in physical company, avoiding eye contact.

The participants also described a conundrum – the solitude that brought them comfort and safety was also suffocating. They were “feeling sad, almost grieving when they were alone”, the researchers said. “There comes a heaviness, like ‘now you are alone again little man, and you will never manage this; you will die alone’” (Peter). To cope, the participants said they kept busy playing computer games and listening to music. Most effective in this regard were physical sports and hobbies like making music, yet sadly the relief evaporated as soon as thoughts of being evaluated crept into mind.

The second main theme was “A doubting self” – including chronic insecurity and a fleeting sense of self. Participants had the perception that other people breeze through life and have no trouble being themselves. Related to this, the participants were constantly struggling to make sense of their own persistent insecurities. “There is always something grinding in my head, so there is no rest. I do not know how to answer myself to make it better” (Anita).

The constant acting and pretense when in company led to feelings “like one is not even there” (Amanda). Sometimes this developed into an emotional hollowness. “I think that it is real fun or should be, but I do not feel anything” (Eva). After wearing a mask for so many years, some participants feared they had forgotten who they truly were underneath. “I feel like I do not know myself anymore” (Amanda). On the positive side, participants found time in nature was therapeutic, especially when immersed in a physical challenge. “There it is only me. I do not have to perform something for others to see. I find enormous pleasure from reaching the mountaintop. Then, you are kind of free” (Elsa).

In short, the researchers said that their participants spend so much time “reflecting on themselves that it seemingly disrupted their everyday life functioning”. They also lacked feelings of belonging, attachment and intimacy. Their suspicion of others and the burden of keeping up appearances “caused the participants to retreat from and thus miss social experiences that might have provided more trustworthy and comforting answers to questions related to the inner mental lives of themselves or others.”

Sørensen and her colleagues said these insights could be useful for therapists. The therapeutic alliance (a warm, trusting relationship between therapist and client) – always important – will be even more critical for clients with avoidant personality disorder. “The therapeutic relationship provides an opportunity for persons diagnosed with AVPD to experience being met with acceptance and understanding,” the researchers said.

They added that “through a reflective process, patients might begin to make sense of why they do not manage what seems easy for most people. With this realization, their motivation to encounter new social learning might increase, together with a beginning of acceptance of life’s inherent uncertainties. Research on treatment of AVPD has been scarce and inconclusive, but the suggestions above do align with promising recommendations emphasizing the importance of social skills training and drawing on findings from social cognition research on mentalization, self‐other differentiation, interpersonal grounding for building a self‐concept, and affect consciousness.”

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/03/18/first-study-to-explore-what-its-like-to-live-with-avoidant-personality-disorder-safe-when-alone-yet-lost-in-their-aloneness/(accessed 18.4.19)

People Who View Their Britishness or Englishness As “Causally Central” To Their Self-Concept Are More Likely to Have Voted For Brexit, Study Finds

Political partisanship can be a major driving force behind many thoughts and behaviours, affecting obvious things like who to vote for, but also more tangential outcomes, such as how you interpret scientific evidence (liberals and conservatives alike tend to see evidence as more credible when it supports their ideological viewpoint).

But the situation is more complicated than that, as people’s actions are not always consistent with their political identity. What determines why about 8 per cent of Republicans voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election, for example, rather than Donald Trump?

According to a paper published recently in Cognition, the answer may lie in how central an individual’s political affiliation is in the tangled web of features that make up their self-concept. A person’s identity contains a range of features, from characteristics like gender and age to political beliefs and moral principles. One feature can be caused by another: for example, someone might believe that they are an honest person as a direct result of the fact that they are also Christian. Previous research has suggested that the more “causally central” a feature is – that is, the more of these kinds of links that it has – the more fundamental it is to a person’s identity.

Stephanie Chen at London Business School and Oleg Urminsky at the University of Chicago wondered whether a person may be more likely to act in ways consistent with their political beliefs if they see their political identity as “causally central” to their self-concept, and they investigated this in an American and then a British context.



The pair first gave 243 American participants an online survey designed to measure aspects of their self-identity on the day before the 2016 presidential elections, including questions about their demographics and their political views, such as which political party they were affiliated with and their position on various issues like gun control and taxes.

The participants then answered a series of questions about how these various features of their identity related to each other – for example whether “being a Republican” or “being male” had an influence on other aspects of their personal identity. They repeated this process for each of the 20 features, providing a complete map of which bits of self-identity they felt were causally related. Finally, the day after the election, participants were asked which candidate they voted for, and how much they approved of the candidate their party had nominated.

Unsurprisingly, 89 per cent of Democrats and 71 per cent of Republicans voted for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, respectively. But the association between political affiliation and voting behaviour was not uniform: participants were more likely to have voted for their own party’s candidate if they saw their politics as more causally central to their self-concept.

Interestingly, this association held even when the researchers took into account how satisfied participants were with their own party’s candidate. “This result suggests that even among people who disapproved of their party’s candidate, those for whom political party was more causally central [in their self-concept] were more likely to nevertheless vote with their party”, write the researchers.

And this principle is not just limited to party affiliation – or unique to the United States. In a second study, 243 UK participants who identified as British or English completed a similar survey. But rather than looking at party affiliation, the researchers were interested in the centrality of national identity to people’s self-concept and how this related to their voting behaviour – this time in the Brexit referendum.

The authors found that people whose national identity (either their Britishness or Englishness) was central to their self-concept were more likely to have voted for Brexit.

The research sheds light on how political identity affects some people’s behaviour more than others, say the authors. But this research focused on outcomes directly relevant to a person’s political affiliations. It remains to be seen whether the “centrality” of people’s political beliefs in their identity also influences more downstream cognitive processes, such as how objectively they can appraise evidence that supports their political viewpoints.

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/04/08/people-who-view-their-britishness-or-englishness-as-causally-central-to-their-self-concept-more-likely-to-have-voted-for-brexit-study-finds/#more-36872(accessed 18.4.19)

A Mental Sign Of Vitamin B12 Deficiency

Good sources of vitamin B12 include fish, poultry, eggs and low-fat milk.



Depression can be a sign of vitamin B deficiency, research suggests.

The study found that people who were depressed responded better to treatment when they had high levels of vitamin B12 in their blood.


For the study, 115 people suffering from depression were split into three groups depending on how well they were responding to treatment.

Blood tests revealed that those who did best had the highest concentrations of vitamin B12.

Those who remained the most depressed had the lowest levels of vitamin B12.

Good sources of vitamin B12 include fish, poultry, eggs and low-fat milk.

Fortified breakfast cereals also contain vitamin B12.

People who may have difficult getting enough vitamin B12 include vegetarians, older people and those with some digestive disorders, such as Crohn’s disease.

The study’s authors write:


“As far as we know, there have been no previous studies that have suggested a positive relationship between vitamin B12 and the treatment outcome in patients with major depressive disorder who have normal or high vitamin B12 levels.”

Other studies have shown that elderly people who take vitamin B supplements respond better to depression treatment.


However, the picture is still mixed on the role of vitamin B12 in depression.

SOURCE:

https://www.spring.org.uk/2019/04/mental-vitamin-b12.php(accessed 13.4.19)