Racial bias costs the U.S. economy a staggering $2 trillion annually. Here are 5 potential solutions

Bias is the building block of most challenges we face individually, locally, and globally. It shows up in our interactions with coworkers, family members, and strangers. It impairs the services we provide in our professional lives, such as healthcare, education, or policing. It compromises the products we design, such as apps, clothing, and the code for artificial intelligence. It limits the cultural narratives we construct in film, theater, and the arts. It hinders the success of policy solutions we recommend for issues like climate change, disinformation, and public health crises. Most strikingly, it shows up in how we treat ourselves and one another. 

Breaking bias is one of the most important work we each do in the 21st century. This is because breaking bias goes to the core of who we are as humans: how we live, how we work, how we commune and interact with others, and, most important, how we relate to ourselves and others.

The Cost of Bias

Research has shown that holding on to biases is bad for our health. Biases impair our ability to make decisions, and they increase our stress, anxiety, and general frustration levels. Socially, bias creates workplaces, communities, and societies that are unfair and in which people lack the skills to deal with conflict, disagreements, and misunderstandings, which create numerous costs, such as attrition, litigation, and poor performance.

Systemically, economists estimate that racial bias alone costs the American economy at least $2 trillion annually in terms of wasted costs and thwarted performance. If $2 trillion is just the annual cost of racial bias in one country, imagine what the accumulated financial costs of all forms of bias—gender, sexuality, disability, and class, among others—would be in America or countries globally. That’s a lot of wasted time, effort, talent, resources, and physical, emotional, mental energy, and, most important, human potential.

Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari advises that “For every dollar and every minute we invest in improving artificial intelligence, it would be wise to invest a dollar and a minute in advancing human consciousness.” In other words, dedicating our resources and efforts toward breaking bias.

The PRISM Tool kit: Our Pathway to Breaking Bias

Just as we learn how to cook or drive, biases are learned too. We are not born with biases. We are not born to think that women are weaker than men. Or that dark-skinned humans are less attractive than light-skinned ones. Or that rich people are hardworking and poor people are lazy. Each one of these “stereotypes” is learned, and they manifest as bias. Biases are learned habits that distort how we perceive, reason, remember, and make decisions. Just as they are learned, they can be unlearned by using the PRISM tool kit.

PRISM is a neuroscience-based tool kit that supports people in unlearning and breaking bias. It stands for Perspective-taking, pRosocial behaviors, Individuation, Stereotype replacement, and Mindfulness. We begin the practice of PRISM with mindfulness and work our way backward to perspective-taking. Below you’ll find a brief explanation of each tool.

• Mindfulness: Mindfulness is the bedrock of breaking bias and the PRISM tool kit. It is the practice of noticing, of becoming aware or conscious of what is happening in your experience—body, heart, mind—in the present moment.
• Stereotype replacement: The practice of becoming mindful of group-based associations and unwholesome habits and actively replacing them with real, positive counterexamples or wholesome habits.
• Individuation: The practice of investigation and decoupling group-based associations from individuals and experiences with curiosity.
• Prosocial behavior: The practice of cultivating positive mental states and emotions that intend to alleviate suffering or benefit others, e.g., kindness, compassion, and empathy.
• Perspective-taking: The practice of imagining possibilities of being beyond your lived experience, including the vantage points of other humans.

Practicing PRISM tools helps interrupt the conscious and unconscious habits of bias programmed in our minds. They support professionals in correcting false beliefs and building new habits of thought toward oneself and others with greater awareness, curiosity, and compassion. 

In addition, these tools produce numerous wellness and well-being benefits like social connectedness, social trust, emotional regulation, stress and anxiety reduction, and memory boosting.

While PRISM can be practiced in many ways, I have found meditation to be the most effective medium for creating lasting behavior change. Science has also shown that up to eight weeks of regular meditation practice supports new habit creation, as well as the breaking of old habits such as binge eating, addiction, and bias.

Supporting thousands of professionals in advancing inclusion and wellness has affirmed for me that in order to take action we have to get out of our heads and practice what we know. We can read recipes for our favorite dishes all day, but we will not get to taste them until we put them into practice and start cooking. The many leaders we admire, like Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, and Warren Buffett, trained their minds and nervous systems in rigorous disciplines and practices to achieve success and results. 

In today’s world, the challenges associated with bias have entered all aspects of our daily life. PRISM tools offer us the training we need to be aware of why things are the way they are and to take action to transform them. 

This excerpt is adapted with permission from Breaking Bias: Where Stereotypes and Prejudices Come From—and the Science-Backed Method to Unravel Them (Hay House/PRH, 2024).