Othering: Hurdles to Effective Collaboration
By Louise Rollins, MA, CED, Maryland/DC H&V
Many of us, if we’re lucky, work in teams that consist of members from a variety of backgrounds. Maybe you’re building a team for your child made up of therapists, educators, and medical providers from different agencies that provide services to your family. Or perhaps you sit on a state advisory committee with representatives from various agencies and stakeholder groups around the area. Whatever the scenario, when we interact with a diverse group of people, unconscious bias creeps into our interactions. In addition to biases based on personal characteristics like race or gender, those of us who work with deaf/hard of hearing children have an additional dimension to contend with: we hold conscious and unconscious expectations about individuals who come from different backgrounds, programs, and philosophies. We often make automatic assumptions about what people value, know, or can do based on scraps of information rather than on facts. This can play out in two specific kinds of bias: Othering and Group Attribution Bias.
When we put Othering and Group Attribution Bias together, what happens can look like this: “Those who are different than me are very different, in a bad way, and everyone from that group is the same.” Suddenly, we seem to know a lot about the person across the table from us based on the letters they have after their name or the organizations they are affiliated with–and we’re sure it isn’t good. We have all been guilty of this in our teams, regardless of our role.
Take some time to honestly reflect on your attitudes towards:
- Hearing parents
- Deaf parents
- Speech therapists
- Audiologists
- The staff from _____ school
- The staff from _____ hospital
- Administrators
- The Deaf community
What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about someone from any of these groups? Is that grounded in truth? Is it always true? How do you know? Are your assumptions about these people preventing you from learning more about them– something that might allow you to connect and collaborate more successfully?
The conscious part of our brain is probably embarrassed to think that we could be so biased. The many reasons for this behavior are complex, but can be simplified into a few categories.
Patterns & Predictions
Our brains like finding patterns and knowing what to expect. It makes it easier to go through life by putting people into predictable categories because it helps us know how to behave in our daily lives. We generally know what to expect from a doctor versus a cashier. When a doctor asks us to disrobe in an exam room, we are not generally taken off guard, although we definitely would be if a cashier made the same request!
Anxiety & Fear
We fear the unknown because it makes it harder to know how to behave or respond, so putting people into predetermined categories brings us back into familiar territory. Brain research suggests that when we experience fears about individuals we consider to be in “our group,” those fears actually fade faster than for those from the “outside.” So even though we may have negative experiences with someone from “our group,” our shared identity makes it easier to attribute that person’s mistakes to the individual, rather than the entire group.
Availability Heuristic
The availability heuristic is simpler than it sounds. This is the concept that if something is easier to think of, we believe it must be more prevalent in the world. Contributing to this are things like stereotypes, but also media coverage, as well as intense personal experiences. You may have had one single experience with one individual from a group that was so negative that it now colors your view of everyone else from that group. The more intense that experience, the more likely it is that impression will stay with you, regardless of how many people you meet from that group who contradict your idea.
Critical awareness is the first step of combating these biases. We have gone through a very abbreviated version in this article. You must examine the assumptions you make about various groups and theorize about where they come from. Was it one specific and formative experience early in your journey? Or could it be a label your brain has created for a group that you don’t know much about, which feels like the “out group” for you? Next, we must confront ourselves with the question: Is it true? Is my assumption true for this individual, in this situation, in this moment?
To answer that question, we may need to get close and get curious! Spend time with the individuals you’re making assumptions about. Ask questions and listen to the answers with an open mind. Remind yourself that when you meet one person from a group, they can only truly represent themselves. Resist the urge to think of someone as a spokesperson for any group they belong to, unless that really is their stated role. The more time we spend getting to know people who belong to different groups than we do, asking tough questions of ourselves, and answering them honestly, the more we will chip away at those harmful assumptions we make of each other. It’s hard and slow work, but it ultimately pays off in more authentic relationships with others and more effective collaboration within our teams. ~
Definitions
Othering is when we view or treat a person (or group of people) as intrinsically different from ourselves, sharply contrasted with our concept of “us.” Othering implies that this difference is somehow problematic. In other words, those people who are different than me – they’re VERY different than me, and that’s bad. This us-versus-them thinking puts people into those mental categories of the in-group and the out-group. Red flag terms: “the” and “those,” such as “the Deaf,” “those CI people,” “the school,” “those parents.”
Group Attribution Bias
Group Attribution Bias (sometimes called Group Attribution Error) is the tendency for individuals to assume that a group member’s personal characteristics, preferences, beliefs, attitudes, and decisions are similar to the preferences of the group to which they belong. In other words: if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all! This can work in the opposite direction, as well, when one assumes that what’s generally true of a group must be true for each and every member of that group. In practice, this is where we get over-generalizations and stereotypes. Red flag terms: “all,” “none,” “always,” “never.”
Bias in action
We may be especially resistant to acknowledging Othering and Group Attribution Bias in ourselves, especially after decades of growing awareness in our society about how harmful stereotypes are. Surely, I know better! Let’s see an example of bias in action. Consider the question: Are pit bulls aggressive? Your personal experience will heavily influence your answer, so we can make this question easier to answer by making it more specific: Are some pit bulls aggressive? Unfortunately, due to training or neglect, some pit bulls certainly are aggressive. But are all pit bulls aggressive? The answer is surely no–some pit bulls live out happy lives with their families. However, the question that’s harder to answer is: Are many pit bulls aggressive? And ultimately, the real-world question that we need to answer is: If you approach an unknown pit bull, should you use caution? How will your personal experience with this group influence which quality you attribute to the entire group of pit bulls? And how is it that some pieces of information have more influence over us than others? Most importantly, what happens when you replace pit bulls with a certain type of person with whom you need to collaborate? ~
Editor’s note: Along with her affiliation with the Maryland/DC Chapter, Rollins is a Teacher of the Deaf with Montgomery County Infants and Toddlers Program, Upcounty.
H&V Communicator – Summer 2019