Near the end of former President Donald Trump’s tenure, he ordered a restriction on diversity training programs in federal agencies, a move that was promptly reversed at the start of President Biden’s administration. Though I agree with the importance of pursuing diversity, equity, and inclusion in organizations and education, there is a problem with most current diversity training programs: They don’t actually promote diversity.
In fact, instead of taking down barriers between groups, such as those caused by gender or race and ethnicity, most diversity training programs put up even more.
In my field of social and organizational psychology, we often study a concept called “entitativity.” To avoid the tongue twister, we sometimes just call it “groupiness,” or the perception of a group of people as a distinct unit, separate from other groups.
Entitativity is sometimes helpful, especially when it comes to teamwork.
But in most cases, stronger entitativity means greater bias in favor of one’s own group and against people not in the group. Social psychologist Eli Finkel described this ingroup versus outgroup bias as “a poisonous cocktail of othering, aversion, and moralization [that] poses a threat to democracy.”
What does this have to do with diversity?
Too often, diversity is pursued as nothing more than a surface-level “coloring” of the staff to give off the appearance of diverse genders or races at the organization. But that’s not the goal of diversity. The goal of diversity is to respect and embrace the different perspectives and opinions that arise from having people with different cultural backgrounds, walks of life, and upbringings.
To benefit from diversity, people need to be willing to hear and embrace perspectives different than their own.
And if entitativity is too high, research in social psychology tells us that people are far less likely to consider the perspective of someone who isn’t part of their group.
Here’s where most diversity training programs put up barriers and increase entitativity rather than taking down barriers and reducing it.
The popular “microaggressions” training curriculum perpetuates stereotypes that all people of a certain group act a specific way because of their membership in that group. Psychologist Scott Lilienfeld articulated many concerns over microaggression training that assumes all members of a given race would, for example, be offended by the statement, “You must be good at math!”
Certainly, there are statements that people carelessly make that can reflect unintentional personal biases and cause harm to others. But to teach people to predict and judge how others might respond solely on the basis of their skin color further perpetuates a sense of “us versus them” rather than lowers barriers between groups.
Moreover, the more recent push for teaching about white supremacy has been criticized for reducing people down to nothing more than “blackness” (good) versus “whiteness” (evil). Again, there is certainly evidence to suggest that black people have experienced a disproportionate amount of disadvantages and hardships. But the focus should be on getting people to hear, understand, and empathize with people from different backgrounds, not gathering everyone who belongs to one group and hammering them with the idea that they are distinct from all other groups.
The goal of diversity training should be about helping people embrace and benefit from others’ perspectives. Sadly, this kind of diversity is generally lacking. For example, a study of over 7,000 faculty voter registrations found an enormous lack of diversity in political perspective among college professors in the United States. And despite diversity being a major part of most large businesses’ agendas, companies such as Google have been accused of being “thought police,” preventing the very diversity of perspective that’s necessary in diversity training.
As an Asian American, I would love to see greater representation of my perspective gained from growing up in the U.S. as a first-generation immigrant in a primarily Asian American community.
But as long as diversity training keeps defining me by the color of my skin rather than the value of my perspective, that will likely never happen.
Steven Zhou is a doctoral student in industrial-organizational psychology at George Mason University. His research interests and expertise include leadership development, employee motivation, and statistical data analysis.
