Lessons emerge from coffee shop

A term unfamiliar to many of us — unconscious bias — emerged this week from within a Starbucks coffee shop in Philadelphia. It is a term worth defining and exploring.

Kevin Johnson, the CEO of Starbucks, believes that. He has ordered more than 8,000 of the company’s stores, including two in the Central Susquehanna Valley, to shut down for hours on May 29 so that nearly 175,000 employees can devote a few hours to learn more about it and talk with each other.

All of this happened this week after a video showed police talking with two black men seated at a Starbucks table. After a few minutes, officers handcuffed the men and led them outside as other customers spoke out, saying they did nothing wrong. The men said they were just waiting for a friend.

Police said they responded to the coffee shop in response to a call from an employee — two minutes after the men arrived, the Washington Post reports — who told an emergency dispatcher that the men were refusing to make a purchase and refusing to leave.

Johnson reacted immediately, calling the situation “reprehensible” before flying to Philadelphia to meet with the men face-to-face and offer his apology. Johnson also promised to revamp store management training to include education on “unconscious bias.”

So what is unconscious bias?

It “refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions and decisions in an unconscious manner,” said Dr. Renee Navarro, vice chancellor for Diversity and Outreach at the University of California at San Francisco.

In a website focusing on the issue, Dr. Navarro said research shows that these unconscious and automatically activated thoughts can result in significant results, including adverse hiring and evaluation practices and a lack of workforce diversity.

The website states there are two types of biases: conscious, also known as explicit bias, and unconscious, also known as implicit bias.

“Unconscious biases are social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness. Everyone holds unconscious beliefs about various social and identity groups, and these biases stem from one’s tendency to organize social worlds by categorizing.

“Unconscious bias if far more prevalent than conscious prejudice and often incompatible with one’s conscious values,” the UCSF website states. “Certain scenarios can activate unconscious attitudes and believes. For example, biases may be more prevalent when multi-tasking or working under time pressure.”

Dr. Navarro notes that more than 5,000 studies have been conducted on unconscious bias over the past two decades. “Fortunately, this enhanced understanding has led to the development of strategies to assess and address unconscious bias,” she writes.

A higher level of understanding. That may be one of the best results emerging from that coffee shop in Philadelphia.

“Everyone holds unconscious beliefs about various social and identity groups.”