David Rock, author of Your Brain at Work, likes to say: “If you have a brain, you are biased.”  He sees a difference between bias and unconscious bias, though, and is now advocating a SEEDS curriculum that I have written about in a previous blog.  I enjoyed his earlier text, Your Brain at Work. It was well researched.

SEEDS may be more thinly supported.  It’s hard to say.  Where in YBAW Rock consistently referred to specific research and, in many cases, the doctors doing it, the SEEDS model’s research references are hide to find.

I did manage to find a page with some references to research Rock used for SEEDS.  Only two of the unconscious biases are discussed.  Mostly fMRI results are mentioned.  I don’t know if my bias (ha!) is shared by others, but I find many studies based on fMRI and its low-resolution results to be highly suspect.  “Hey! Potatoes light up the prefrontal cortex more than tomatoes!”  fMRI may be much more accurate than when it first was introduced, but experiments that don’t require brain imaging, like those done to study bias for decades, may be more reliable.  They at least seem called for in confirming conclusions drawn from fMRI results.

If I give Rock his due, I think I must conclude that unconscious bias is an extension of YBAW, in that it is based on cognitive science and neurological causes for our behavior.  Unconscious bias isn’t just bias then, which Rock explicitly affirms in his work.  But there’s unconscious bias and then there’s unconscious bias.  Only the latter is neurological in nature.  In other words, it doesn’t follow that claiming ignorance of one’s biased actions make them the domain of Rock-ian unconscious bias.  How inconvenient.

If this were the case, Rock would be a lot more famous than he is today.  Bias has, in one form or another, been studied for decades, if not longer. Rock’s work, while enlightening, doesn’t allow conclusions to be drawn on much of the work that preceded his.  The field of cognitive biases is much bigger than our enterprising David Rock.

SEEDS has some value in a corporate training context, the kind in which I learned it.  But it has some loose ends that are difficult to accept.  One of the ‘E’s is for ‘Experience’.  Based on group discussion, it looks like this ‘E’ can rake every other kind of bias under the umbrella of unconscious bias.  This entitles a certain kind of thinking that I don’t like.  Instead of being responsible for all aspects of ourselves and our behavior, labeling something as an unconscious bias reeks of dismissiveness.  Yes, the whole point is to master these root-level biases, but does explaining every other bias in terms of Rock-ian bias lead us to a more enlightened, less dreadful place?  Or does it just invite sloppy thinking?

Harper Lee, Stanley Milgram, Martin Luther King Jr., Toni Morrison, and a long list of others might not be very impressed if we were to simplify Rock’s point and say, “It’s your brain’s hardwiring that’s responsible…”

Maybe for some things.  But not for others.