ARUN RATH, HOST:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath. The United States work force has more women than ever, more people of color than ever, more gay and transgender employees than ever. So more than ever, researchers are examining diversity and bias in the workplace.
Michelle Duguid is a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She decided to test the validity of a common belief - that requiring the use of politically correct language in the workplace also stifles creativity. It makes sense intuitively.
MICHELLE DUGUID: People should be able to freely think, throw any crazy ideas, and any constraint would actually dampen creativity.
RATH: But Duguid and her co-authors set up an experiment to see if that notion held up to scientific scrutiny. So they sat down students in groups of three to brainstorm ideas on how to use a vacant space on campus. Some of the groups were all men, some all women, others mixed. Control groups got to start right away with the brainstorming, but the test groups were primed with this script.
DUGUID: We're interested in gathering examples from college undergraduates of political correct behavior on campus. As a group, please list examples of political correctness that you have either heard of or directly experienced on this campus. And they did that for 10 minutes.
RATH: In the same-sex trios, the old notion held true. Groups of three men or three women who were instructed to think about political correctness were less creative than the control group. But in the mixed-gender groups that got the PC drill, creativity went up.
DUGUID: They generated more ideas, and those ideas were more novel. Whether it was two men and one woman or two women and one man, the results were consistent.
RATH: Here's how Duguid interprets those results.
DUGUID: Men are uncertain about, you know, what may be seen maybe as sexist or inappropriate. And women, they're uncertain about, you know, can I speak up because will my ideas be valued. But in both cases, by reducing this uncertainty, people were much more open - both men and women - to share more ideas and more novel ideas; ideas that were kind of out-of-the-box that would be associated with uncertainty.
RATH: Duguid and her colleagues started another experiment, one that looked at stereotypes. They tested whether educating people about stereotypes would in turn reduce stereotyping.
DUGUID: But we found that by telling, publicizing that everyone stereotypes - we'd say the vast majority of people stereotype in our study - that it actually creates a norm for stereotyping. People feel more comfortable expressing stereotypes or acting in ways that would be seen as inappropriate because it has set up this norm where everyone does it, so I might not be punished or isn't that bad.
RATH: Duguid and her co-author tinkered with their message. Rather than telling the group that everyone was guilty of stereotyping, they simply told them this.
DUGUID: The vast majority of people put effort into not stereotyping.
RATH: Here's what they found.
DUGUID: And by telling them the vast majority of people put effort into not stereotyping, actually had great effects, and it was the same as telling them that few people stereotyped. So that actually reduced stereotyping, and it was better - significantly better than telling them nothing at all.
RATH: For Michelle Duguid, the good news from her study is this.
DUGUID: I think most people want to be unbiased. And there are ways that we can try to make that happen.
RATH: Professor Michelle Duguid of Washington University.