I’m currently reading “Poor Economics”, an incredibly insightful book about global poverty, by the Nobel Prize-winning economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. It is here that I first heard about of “Elite Bias”.
So what’s Elite Bias?
A class experiment, conducted by researchers in the book, couldn’t illustrate this better.
Researchers divided a typical classroom into two tracks. Based on prior performance, a student ended up either on the top track or the bottom track. Teachers were then randomly selected by a lottery system to exclusively teach either one of the two tracks.
What followed was interesting to say the least.
Teachers who ‘lost’ the lottery and got assigned to the lower track were distraught and stated they wouldn’t get anything out of teaching such students. Later on, random visits to classrooms showed they spent more time in the break rooms having coffee and were less likely to teach students than teachers in the ‘top track’. The quality of education being imparted by the former visibly dipped.
In conclusion, the teachers’ low expectations from these students turned out to be more damaging than the students being relatively worse off than those in the top track itself.
In hindsight, if there were students in the bottom track who just needed that extra nudge or support to do considerably better, they would have lost out because now they were being given poorer education simply because they were labelled ‘inferior’. Thus, preconceived notions, coupled with the teachers’ actions, became a self-fulfilling prophecy in cementing these students as apparently inferior!
‘Elite Bias’ is not just a classroom phenomenon and studies even show parents pickin a one child to back over onother they think wouldn’t do well.
So what’s its relevance to us here?
If ‘Elite Bias’ is a natural human phenomenon, would it be surprising if we extended this beyond classrooms to corporate offices too?
As leaders, we might naturally tend to subconsciously divide subordinates into top and bottom-trackers (performers and non-performers?) and then provide extra care, encouragement, and that extra push to the former because they will ostensibly get great results!
As for the rest, we might just go through the motions and do the bare minimum. After all, what’s the point in doing extra if they aren’t going to really get anywhere? Consequences of this cognitive bias aren’t difficult to imagine. Top-trackers end up doing even better, and the bottom-trackers end up worse, thus resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy justifying their positioning!
Wonder how many, who could have turned around with a little extra care, missed out by ending in the wrong half!
PS: No assistants, no bot-generated content. Just a pair of eyes that read, a head that learns and two hands that type away on weekends amidst weekend chores. Like what you read? Let me know. Or better still, share this with another soul.
Six Strings For Supper 