The Review: What if DEI training makes people more biased?

A new study suggests that antiracist pedagogy just doesn't work. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. If you’ve taught at a college or university in the last decade, you’ve almost certainly sat through some required diversity, equity, and inclusion programming. Perhaps you were on a search committee and had to meet regularly with a diversity consultant who promised to help root out your implicit biases. Or you were a graduate student asked to attend a workshop on “antiracist pedagogy.” (In 2020, [for instance]( such workshops became “mandatory for all tenure-track, tenured, non-tenure-track, part-time, and graduate instructors — everyone” in the English department at Rutgers University.) Perhaps you were invited, or even compelled, to attend a session on “allyship training.” All of this stuff has been controversial for a long time, felt by many to be a form of ideological indoctrination. But a new [study]( sponsored by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and the Rutgers University Social Perception Lab suggests that, even on its own terms, it just doesn’t work. That’s not an entirely new finding. The authors cite research going back to 2004 suggesting that, at least some of the time, diversity programming paradoxically promotes the very forms of prejudice it is meant to mitigate — a kind of backlash effect. That ironic outcome, the authors write, afflicts the post-2020 wave of DEI training sessions especially severely. They home in on the “antiracism” and “anti-oppression” pedagogy associated with Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist (2019). Do the programs inspired by Kendi’s book and related efforts “foster pluralistic inclusiveness, or do they exacerbate intergroup and interpersonal conflicts?” To find out, the authors curated some of the more prominent and widely used “anti-oppressive DEI educational materials” and then performed an experiment: Rhetoric from these materials was excerpted and administered in psychological surveys measuring explicit bias, social distancing, demonization, and authoritarian tendencies. Participants were randomly assigned to review these materials or neutral control material. Their responses to this material was assessed through various questions assessing intergroup hostility and authoritarianism, and through scenario-based questions. Subscribe to The Chronicle Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The result? Far from reducing prejudice and interpersonal friction, the antiracist material “engendered a hostile attribution bias, amplifying perceptions of prejudicial hostility where none was present, and punitive responses to the imaginary prejudice.” (“Hostile attribution bias,” according to the American Psychological Association, names “a general tendency to ascribe harmful or otherwise adverse intent to the ambiguous behavior of others.”) In other words, DEI training may be socializing its subjects into a condition of pathological hyper-vigilance. If that’s true, Kendi-style antiracist pedagogy will likely join “trigger warnings” — another intervention that some studies suggest have the opposite of their intended effect — on the ash heap of abandoned fads. In light of the NCRI and Rutgers Social Perception Lab’s research, might those colleges currently [expanding]( their diversity-training efforts to include antisemitism reconsider? 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