Your Bias Problem Might Actually Be a Personality Problem: Lessons From My Kindergarten Teacher
By: Dr. Bentley Lorene Gibson
Most people think of bias as something that happens in the moment: a snap judgment, a flawed decision, a bad interaction. But bias doesn't appear out of nowhere. It grows out of who we already are. My research points to two personality traits that shape how tightly we hold onto stereotypes and how those stereotypes show up in our behavior: openness to new experience and conscientiousness.
“I think of you as an adorable hard-working student but yet with a hesitancy that I teasingly called sassy.”
That's my Kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Jean Berger, describing five-year-old me. I recently had the chance to speak with her again. She's 73 now, and she still remembered exactly who I was: a reserved little girl, deeply attached to my caregivers, growing up as a little Black girl in White Plains, NY, in a world that wasn't always safe. Mrs. Berger built one anyway. When I thanked her for that, she told me something I haven't stopped thinking about. She stated, "Throughout my career of 40 plus years it was always important that students did feel safe in my classroom and at school. Safe to try new things, safe to make mistakes and safe to share and explore feelings." That reserved, cautious little girl she remembers wasn't a phase. That was temperament, the early, biologically rooted patterns present at birth that form the foundation of personality. Traces of it are still part of who I am today.
Where Bias Actually Lives
This matters for bias work because openness to new experience and conscientiousness aren't traits adults pick up out of nowhere either. They have roots that go back just as far. Openness shapes how comfortable you are with change, ambiguity, and people or ideas unfamiliar to you. Conscientiousness shapes how impulsive you are, and whether you pause to think before you act or react. Both are foundational to how you move through the world, and both directly influence how susceptible you are to stereotyping and biased decision-making. This is exactly why bias work cannot be treated as a trend, a checkbox, or a side gig for anyone with a slide deck. When something becomes popular and lucrative, people without the research background show up to do the work, and that is a real part of why so many training programs failed and so many people grew skeptical of DEI altogether.
Low openness and low conscientiousness don't just make you biased. They make you more likely to act on that bias impulsively, to make poor decisions rooted in stereotypes rather than facts, and to put yourself at risk for behaviors you'll later regret.
If you can, call up your kindergarten teacher. Or do what I did and find her on Facebook. Ask her what she remembers about you. You might be surprised by how much of who you are today was already visible to them then, and by how much a single adult who made you feel safe shaped the direction you took. That conversation is worth having, not just for the nostalgia, but because it can show you, in real terms, where your own personality started and how far back your patterns actually go.
This is the type of deep work we do in The Bias Adjuster workshops: getting past surface-level training to the personality-level patterns that actually drive bias, and helping organizations reduce the risk that unaddressed bias creates.
I challenge you to think about the parts of your personality that have always been there. Name them. Then decide, on purpose, to use those traits for something good, and adjust the ones that do not serve you or the people you interact with any good.
About the author: Dr. Bentley Gibson, PhD, is a cognitive and developmental psychologist specializing in implicit bias, and the founder of The Bias Adjuster. Her published research includes studies on the early development of racial bias in children (Journal of Cognition and Culture).
