ARTS, HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCES Combatting Unconscious Bias through Gaming by Dr Anne Holohan, Associate Professor for Sociology in the Trinity School of Social Sciences and Philosophy and PI in Transformation in Learning and Training (TiLT) Unconscious biases are the learned stereotypes that we all form without realizing it. Everyone has unconscious biases in favour of, or against, various groups, whether we acknowledge them or not. We may like to think we judge everyone on merit, but research and lived experience says otherwise. Unconscious bias affects how we interact – in social situations, in the classroom, and in the workplace. It affects who we hire, how we teach, how we listen, and how we resolve conflict. Addressing unconscious bias is vital if we want to build more meaningful relationships and more equitable, diverse, and well- run workplaces. I am the scientific lead on a multidisciplinary project which brings together social science researchers, software developers, designers, and entrepreneurs to develop products for unconscious bias training. Our project, Transformation in Learning and Training (TiLT) - www.tiltroleplay.com - develops curricula about biases and embeds these in online role-playing games for organisations. The aim is to build players’ knowledge about their own biases, and awareness of the experiences of people different to them, and to embed this knowledge and awareness through ‘learning by doing’. The challenge of producing training to mitigate biases, not just at the individual unconscious level, but at the organisational and systemic level, is what drives us. Our goal is to get players to think about how some aspects of their identity give them unearned privilege, while other aspects unfairly disadvantage them, and where this comes from, and how it impacts their individual experience and the organisation. Gender, race, and ethnicity are the key biases we address to date, but we touch on class and sexuality, and intend to develop those further, and will also address disability and age in future games. Our games are built around everyday interactions, as these are crucial in generating and regenerating the norms and culture of any organisation. The player takes the perspective of the main characters in the game. Perspective-taking is one of our three pedagogical strategies, and it involves playing through the eyes of someone who is different in some respect to the player, and crucially seeing how other characters react to the player. Our trials have shown, supporting previous research, that this increases the players capacity to realise that individual, organisational and societal/systemic biases shape everyone’s experiences. Their ability to see and understand bias, and to mitigate it in their own interactions, increases. Our second pedagogical strategy is knowledge acquisition - each game has pop-up Learning Objectives linking concepts around bias to what is happening to the characters in the game. This is effortless learning, and the trial results indicate that knowledge increases for the majority of players. The third pedagogical strategy is practice, or decision-making, that allows the player to implement their new knowledge and awareness. The games are designed to be delivered through organisations. Each player gets feedback through assessment before, during and after the game, and the organisation sees the anonymised aggregate progress across all the players, helping it identify areas to address in procedure and policy. So far, we have worked with our trial partner, Trinity, to develop a game set in a university, and we are currently working with Seattle Police Department to develop a game set in a US police department. Both games have a curriculum in gender, race and ethnicity embedded in storylines set in everyday scenarios with complex characters, and engaging design. We’re excited to see where this work can go – the demand is huge. It is really stimulating to work together in a diverse team on social science curriculum development and content creation, software development, art and design and product development. My research goals are to get the wealth of knowledge in social sciences out of the university into organisations and wider society, and to work with other disciplines to come up with solutions to social challenges. It’s challenging and engaging to be meeting these goals through games.
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