Starbucks announced it would close 8,000 U.S. stores for an afternoon next month for racial-bias training for 175,000 employees on the heels of the arrests of 2 Black men in a Philadelphia, PA store whose only crime was hanging out while Black.

My advice to these baristas is this. Going to mandated unconscious bias training is only going to make you more biased.

Robert Cialdini, President of Regents' Professor of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University and Vladas Griskevicius of University of Minnesota did some experiments at a hotel trying to get guests to reuse their towels.

They developed 3 different signs to be posted in the hotel rooms. Message 1 simply asked customers to reuse their towels. Message 2 indicated reusing towels would be good for the environment. Message 3 specified that 44% of patrons who stayed in this room reused their towels.

Here were the results. Message 1 increased towel reuse by 33%. Message 2 improved towel recycling by 44%. Message 3 persuaded visitors to salvage their towels by 75%.

Lesson learned: Messages that model good conduct as a social norm can influence others to embrace positive behavior.

Michelle Duguid of Cornell University and Melissa Thomas-Hunt of the University of Virginia performed a study that proved the opposite. They did research that measured the reaction of participants when told that bias is natural and resides in all of us. Their findings suggested that reminding people that they are biased encouraged them to exhibit more bias particularly against women, obese people and senior citizens.

In one particular case, Duguid and Thomas-Hunt found that just talking about gender inequities normalized the glass ceiling for women. By continually reminding survey contributors of gender bias, participants in the study concluded that there was nothing they could do about this injustice. They determined it “is what it is.” They decided that if I am biased and you are biased then the inescapable truth is there is nothing any of us can do about it.

Anthony Greenwald, the creator of the Implicit Association Test that measures a person's automatic association between mental representations of objects and concepts in memory agrees. He asserts that just understanding implicit bias does not provide the tools to do something about it.

Mike Eynon, a technology executive at RedSeal Networks claims that bias training makes white people feel good by increasing their awareness of the issue and at the same time sends a message to the very same white people that bias is not their fault. Consequently they decide that bias isn’t their problem.

The problem of not addressing bias in a constructive way is rooted in the knowing and doing gap when it comes to inclusion. We know we need be inclusive, we just don’t do it.

Confucius once said, “What I hear I forget, what I see I may remember, what I do, I understand.”

Want to better understand bias. Start doing something about it.