Inclusive Growth Show

The Power of Behavioural Science in Understanding Workplace Bias

• Toby Mildon • Episode 142

Share episode

Send us a text

Teaser
“Why do we make the choices we do, and how does that impact workplace inclusivity? Toby Mildon welcomes Dr Joshua Fullard, Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School, for a deep dive into decision-making and the biases that shape our behaviour.”

Episode Overview
In this episode of The Inclusive Growth Podcast, Toby Mildon speaks with Dr Joshua Fullard about:

  • The role of behavioural science in understanding decision-making
  • Insights into implicit biases, such as the beauty premium and similarity bias
  • How assumptions about appearance and identity impact workplace dynamics and hiring practices
  • The importance of diversity in education and why it matters for student outcomes

Key Takeaways

  • Exploring Behavioural Science: Dr Fullard shares insights into how behavioural science helps us understand biases and the factors influencing decisions.
  • The Beauty Premium: People deemed more attractive often receive more positive outcomes, yet this ‘beauty premium’ has complex effects, including heightened performance expectations.
  • Implicit Bias in Hiring: Biases, such as favouring candidates who mirror the decision-makers, impact hiring practices and workplace inclusion.
  • Diversity in Education: Representation in teaching roles impacts students' self-belief, engagement, and career aspirations, highlighting a need for greater diversity among educators.

Guest Bio
Dr Joshua Fullard is an Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School, specialising in decision-making processes, biases, and the psychology behind choices. With a strong background in applied labour economics, his research sheds light on how biases affect workplace and educational outcomes.

Timestamps

  • 0:00 – Introduction to the episode
  • 3:20 – Dr Fullard’s background and his journey into behavioural science
  • 10:00 – What is the beauty premium, and why does it matter?
  • 15:45 – Implicit biases in hiring: in-group and out-group effects
  • 28:00 – Role models in education: why diversity in teachers matters
  • 35:10 – Advice on fostering diversity and inclusion in schools and workplaces

Call to Action
If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review to support The Inclusive Growth Podcast!

Links & Resources

Contact Info

If you're enjoying this episode and looking to boost equity, inclusion, and diversity in your organisation, my team and I are here to help. Our team specialises in crafting data-driven strategies, developing inclusive leaders, designing fair recruitment processes, and enhancing disability confidence. With a blend of professional expertise and lived experience, we're ready to support you on your journey. Reach out to us through our website. 

If you want to build a more inclusive workplace that you can be proud of please visit our website to learn more.

Intro: Welcome to the Inclusive Growth Show with Toby Mildon. Future-proofing your business by creating a diverse workplace.

Toby Mildon: Hey there, thank you ever so much for tuning into this episode of the Inclusive Growth Podcast. I'm Toby Mildon and today I'm joined by Dr Joshua Fullard and Joshua is an Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science at the University of Warwick within the Warwick Business School and he's really interested in exploring and investigating why we make the decisions that we do. So that's what we'll be talking about today, we'll be doing a deep dive into that. Joshua, thanks ever so much for joining me today, it's lovely to see you.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: It's great to see you too, thank you so much for inviting me.

Toby Mildon: You're welcome, so I obviously that was a very high level introduction about who you are and what you do but could you just tell us a bit more about yourself? 

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, I'm an Assistant Professor of Behavioural Science at Warwick Business School which is at the University of Warwick and I've been here now, this is my third academic year, so starting term year three which is really exciting. I previously worked as a lecturer in economics at the University of Essex. I have a PhD in economics and I've also worked in the charitable sector, so I worked for the Think Tank Education Policy Institute which is in London and I also worked for the IFO Institute which is a think tank or research organisation in Munich, so that's kind of my background.

Toby Mildon: That's brilliant. So of all the sectors that you could have worked in and could have got involved in, why were you drawn to education and behavioural science? 

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah, now that is a great question. So probably a lot of it has to do with my family, so I've been really, really fortunate that I grew up in kind of a loving and supportive household with two parents who are teachers and they really supported me and encouraged me to pursue my dreams and have this kind of lifelong passion for learning and I'm really, really fortunate about that. Yeah, so as a consequence, now my sister, she's a teacher, my wife's a teacher, everyone around me is teachers and works in the education space and one of the things I recognise is I had really great childhood and I'm really fortunate about this but not everyone has.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So one of the things I think about with my work is, well, I wanna do stuff that's socially beneficial and outside of kind of the immediate family unit, whether or not that's parents, guardians, grandparents, the most important and influential person in a young person's life is their teacher. So actually that's kind of one of the things that really has drawn me to education, that actually if you wanna make a difference, go into education, actually be that person to help young people develop these kind of cognitive skills, right, to help them develop and have the ability and the tools to face the challenges from tomorrow and pursue their dreams but it's also from kind of the kind of the softer skills, the development of softer skills. So we know teachers are incredibly important at kind of giving, installing kind of this enjoyment of learning, student well-being, social skills and all these other things which I'd argue are equally as important, but really benefits to have kind of this like cohesive and positive society.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So one of the things that I find really cool is actually looking at the benefits of teachers. So we actually see these benefits on kind of workplace earnings and all this stuff but actually there's also these softer benefits on kind of like democratic participation, ability to kind of have difficult conversations with people who don't necessarily agree, so these kind of communication skills and there's also these kind of really cool effects on kind of well-being and health outcomes, so less likely to engage in kind of risky behaviour or kind of make healthy lifestyle choices. So really kind of all that is to say I'm really involved in the education sector and my research is on the education sector and kind of in the behavioural science aspect of why people make choices to really try to make a difference. So I think that was a long way of saying that.

Toby Mildon: That's really good. 'cause you've also, I'm interested 'cause you've also, you started off with economics, didn't you? 

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah.

Toby Mildon: Yeah, so what was the link there between economics and now focusing on behavioural science and why people make the decisions that they do? 

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah, no, so that is a brilliant question. So I think economics is quite a broad term. So I'm a classically trained economist, I have a PhD in economics, that means I've done all kind of necessary training like macro, time series, microeconomics, so looking at kind of different areas of economy.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: And one of the areas I really settled on but I enjoy is called kind of applied labour economics. So that's more specifically looking at, well, how do we apply economic kinda theories and tools and concepts to individual decision making, typically in kind of a labour market? And then one of those battles kind of, my job's kind of after my PhD, this is kind of what I focused on. And then kind of my wider objective, I went, well, actually, there are tools that kind of other disciplines are using.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So like psychology, sociology, kind of these data analytics guys that actually can also be applied to this space. So while I'm kind of specifically trained as an economist, actually, there is an umbrella of researchers who essentially look at judgement and decision making. And actually, my work could also kind of be categorised in that group almost.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: And I have, dare I say, gone to the dark side where I'm collaborating with sociologists, political scientists, psychologists. And honestly, it's actually great fun. So this is probably gonna talk about this more in detail, but actually having discussions and interactions with people who think differently than you and actually have different training and a background view actually really does help develop your own thoughts and research agenda and what you find interesting.

Toby Mildon: I am fascinated by why we make the decisions that we do. It's something I talk about in my work with my clients. So I do a lot of work around the our implicit biases as human beings. And I would say to kinda people that when I first learned unconscious bias myself, when I was working for the BBC, I went on this training course, and it was very much about biases that we had in favour or against different groups of people.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah.

Toby Mildon: And I found out that I was mildly biased against disabled people from the Harvard Implicit Association test, which I was quite surprised about, because I've got a disability that I was born with, and my brother's got the same condition. And I went to school with loads of disabled kids, and I've worked with loads of disabled adults. So I've had my kind of fair share of exposure to disability, yet I've got this mild bias. And it's because of the society in which I've grown up in and how I've been influenced by that. And then I kind of say to people, actually, if unconscious bias training is handled badly, people can often leave feeling quite bad about themselves. Like they must be an ableist, in my case.

Toby Mildon: So the point I'm getting to is that actually a framework that I like to use, that I find really useful was created by the NeuroLeadership Institute in America. And they've come up with five groupings or categories of bias and how those biases show up in decision-making. So they talk about similarity bias, expedience bias, experience bias, distance bias and safety bias.

Toby Mildon: And I find it lands better actually when people think about the biases that show up in decision-making, the choices that they make that may then have a kind of knock-on effect for people around them in terms of building more inclusion or less inclusion. Don't know what your thoughts are or whether you've come across anything like that in your research.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah, no, that's absolutely fascinating. Yes, I've done quite a lot of work on kinda things called like in-group versus out-group preferences. The big idea here is that people tend to evaluate people who are similar to them or have similar characteristics to them more faithfully than other groups. And there's a lot of really important implications to this.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So one of this is that if there is a hiring committee and everyone in the hiring committee has the same characteristics, that means for two equally talented interviewees or people who perform exactly the same, the one whose characteristics match the people who are on the interviewing committee are more likely to favor that person than the other person. So this kind of, this does lead to decision-making, which does affect outcomes. So this is particularly in industries that are very dominant with kind of one group, one gender, one ethnicity, and it does make it quite challenging, not impossible, but quite challenging to actually enter it 'cause it is then more likely that the person who has the same characteristics of the people who are interviewing them are gonna be the ones who are, on average, gonna be favored a little bit more, even though their performances may be exactly the same or maybe even the other candidates are actually a little bit better.

Toby Mildon: Absolutely. And the in-groups, out-groups that you were talking about, that's very much the similarity bias that the Neuro Leadership Institute talk about. They specifically talk about creating in-groups and out-groups and over-appreciating the skills and abilities and experiences of people within our in-group and then undermining or under-appreciating those skills, abilities, and experiences of people in our out-group.

Toby Mildon: And we're doing this unconsciously. It's not like we're pointing at individuals saying, you're in and you're out and you're in and you're out. It's like, it's such automatic unintended behavior in our kind of other-than-consciousness.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah.

Toby Mildon: I'm really interested in the work that you do around assumptions. So could you explain to us a bit about the impact of workplace assumptions in a bit more detail? 

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah. So I think one of the things that I think is absolutely fascinating is, it's linked really nicely to what you're doing, is kind of how people's physical appearance often correlates with how we assume someone would perform. So one of the things I look at is related to something called the beauty premium.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So this is the idea that people often perceive people who are more attractive to be more competent or more able at a given task. And the really fascinating part of this literature is that my research says it's context-dependent, which I'll get onto in a moment, but it also seems like it's this double-edged sword. So for interviewing, being more attractive means you're more likely to get your foot in the door, you're more likely to be offered the job.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: However, as it turns out, beauty is almost uncorrelated with actual ability to do almost every job. So actually, once they are in the workplace, people are actually evaluating them to a higher standard 'cause they are more attractive, and actually then they're penalized for it 'cause they're not meeting the standard that other people expect from them. So there's, I think, this absolutely, so the beauty premium is this fascinating concept.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: And as I said, what I really wanna do in some of my work is understand, well, is this context-dependent? So can we find an environment where less attractive people are actually favored above more attractive people? And kind of, me and some of my colleagues, we've wrapped our head about this, and we were watching some kind of UFC, some mixed martial arts, and we just kind of noticed, hey, it looks like the kind of the stereotypical, like, brutal, aggressive fighters, who are, I'd argue, probably a little bit less attractive, they seem to be getting these decisions more likely than the more attractive fighters. So we kind of, this is exactly what we did. So in this context, where violence and aggression is seen as a positive thing, we actually found that less attractive people were evaluated more highly.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So that is, in an equally competitive fight, when we control for everything that happens, the less attractive fighter is more likely to deemed the winner. So which is absolutely fascinating. So I think that this does kind of the big picture here is that, physical, when you're hiring people, like, this bias automatically comes in, where anytime you're evaluating someone's performance, in kind of almost any context, this kind of bias is gonna come in, and it's gonna negatively affect how you evaluate someone, whether or not it's, evaluating fighters or sports people's performances, or whether or not it's evaluating kind of, just people you're interviewing, their performances.

Toby Mildon: I find that really interesting, 'cause it was either in Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, or Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, where they were talking about how voters in America perceived how good looking presidential candidates were. It's ringing a bell. I can't remember, it was in one of those two books, but basically the researchers were saying that those presidential candidates who were deemed better looking, and it had something to do with, like, the symmetry of their face as well, were more likely to get more votes. Does that ring a bell? 

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah, you nailed on. Great job for mentioning this. This is a really cool area of research. So yeah, so it is about kind of, I don't remember the exact, but it's about proportions of a face measuring from like the center to the sides. There's something about that symmetry that is kind of related to how perceived attractiveness is.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So people with kind of more symmetric features and whatever it is, are perceived to be more attractive. And this does affect voting behavior, both at kind of a presidential election. So I think that the stuff you're citing there is really interesting, but also kind of at a more granular level. So one of my colleagues, Tim Mullett, so he's also at the business school, he's done a very similar project, but he used data for local elections and actually found that, as you said, the attractiveness of a candidate is strongly related on the margins to whether or not they get those little bit of votes more or less. So you can think of this as, if you have a closely contested seat, if you put up a candidate who is, all kind of all things equal, so equally competent from the area and all these other things, if they're a little bit more attractive, they are more likely to actually get those votes and get over the line, which I think is again, yeah, absolutely fascinating.

Toby Mildon: So I've got two questions for you. So one is, how are we defining beauty? 'Cause I'm assuming that this is kind of like a social construct, that beauty in terms of like UK or British terms might be very different to the other side of the world in Japan, for example. So that's kind of one question. Yeah, let's go with that one.

Toby Mildon: So yeah, I mean, how are we defining beauty? 'cause yeah, I don't know, I've got my mum in my ear going, beauty's in the eye of the beholder. And that's like...

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah, absolutely. So the way I measure beauty in kind of my experiments, or kind of my work, is I essentially show a few hundred people different images of people and just ask them to look, to rate their attractiveness and then look at that rating with kind of how people behave. So is someone who is perceived to be more attractive, are they more likely to get the votes? Are they more likely to win the fight? Are they more likely to get the job? And kind of these different things. So that's how kind of I measure this. And it's always important to do in the same kind of context.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So it's kind of Western, typically kind of Western people evaluating the attractiveness and then applying this to kind of Western decision-making. And I think most of the work that I'm aware of uses kind of an approach very similar to that. Some of the work we've just mentioned uses kind of like face symmetry, and they use kind of some measures around that.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: But I think it would be really fascinating to look at kind of cross-cultural differences in these effects. So what I'm talking about is typically work that's been found in kind of the UK and the US. It'd be really fascinating to say, well in other cultures, do these results hold? Now, I'm sure there is lots of really good work on this, but I do work on a lot of different areas and I haven't been able to read everything.

Toby Mildon: Yeah.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: But yeah, that's a really great question.

Toby Mildon: I can imagine once you start researching this, I mean, you could really end up going down lots of rabbit holes. It's fascinating. And there's just so much that you could sort of research and read about it. And I was really interested. So what you're saying is that in some contexts, somebody who's not, "good-looking enough" might actually benefit. So you were talking about the fighters. So I think reading between the lines, what I was hearing was that in a culture where maybe aggression is valued more, somebody who's, "not as good-looking" might actually be at an advantage.

Toby Mildon: So does that mean that if a company or an organization has got a bit of like an aggressive culture, I'm thinking they could be like a real kind of aggressive, sales culture trying to hit targets or maybe working in an industry where it is a bit more aggressive, perhaps, I don't know, security or defense or something like that. Apologies to anyone who's working in security and defense who goes, actually, it's a lovely place to work. But am I onto something there? Is there something in that? 

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah. No, I think you absolutely are 'cause what my work shows is that these effects are context-dependent. And actually, if there is a setting that actually values characteristics like aggression and violence and, these things. And again, I'm not saying these people are attractive.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: But, it could be the case that actually in these settings, traditionally less attractive people might actually be perceived as more competent or better of a job, which I think, yeah, you're definitely onto something, Toby, that's really cool.

Toby Mildon: I mean, there's a reason why I like doing podcasts 'cause people can't see my face. And so you're giving me ideas about industries I should go and work in. So going back to education then, 'cause I know, obviously, you're really passionate about educating and teaching and supporting the next generation of people coming through. How do you feel that we should be promoting more diversity and inclusion within the classroom itself? 

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah, no, I think that's actually a really great point. So for the listeners who don't know, there are some really striking discrepancies between kind of the demographic characteristics of kind of the teaching population, so the teachers and the students they teach.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So just to kind of give a few stats, so almost one in three state schools, primary schools in the state funded sector, do not have a single male classroom teacher. And this has actually gotten worse over the last 24 months. So there's not much kind of, there are very few men in primary schools.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: And there's also issues with kind of ethnic representations. Almost half of the state funded sector, schools in the state funded sector do not have a classroom teacher from an ethnic minority background. And this is compared to, 35% of students are in kind of a state funded sector from an ethnic minority background, and approximately 50% are boys. So there's a really big discrepancy between the characteristics of the teachers and those who they teach. And I think one of the things that I think about, and there's a lot of work on, is actually, well, diversity is important.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So this actually matters. So demographic characteristics do influence outcomes, both kind of educational outcomes. So this is kind of when you think of attainment, progression into education, what jobs they go into.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: But it also affects kind of the development of softer skills. So that's like socialization, enjoyment for learning, well-being, kind of things like that, and kind of a sense of belonging. So there's really fascinating literature that suggests that there's kind of two main effects here.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So one are kind of passive effects, and this is the idea that just being exposed to kind of... So, a teacher's kind of racial, ethnic, or gender identity affects how students respond and how they behave. So, these include like stereotype effects, which is kind of like certain environmental factors can make students more aware of negative stereotypes, which may be associated to their traits, which cause them to underperform. There's actually really cool research on this in the US, which shows that simply increasing the percentage of math teachers who are black in a school has a positive effect on the likelihood that a black student will study maths at a high level.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So, these kind of just kind of mere exposure effects are kind of really important. And then there's kind of a more kind of active effects, which is probably what we typically think of. So, the idea that in certain situations, teachers have different expectations or behave differently towards certain groups.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So, this might be about like pedagogical style. Or so, for example, maybe teachers kind of teach some students differently than others by a little bit, not necessarily consciously, but there's something going on there. So, some of the really fascinating research on this shows that white teachers have lower expectations for black students than black teachers have for those same students. And this has a really serious implications for long-term outcomes.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So, there's these range of effects that show that actually diversity in the classroom really matters. So, now the question is, okay, so Josh, hopefully I've convinced you all that diversity is important and we want to make sure that, the school workforce is broadly representative of the students they teach. Well, what can we do about it? So, I think that the ultimate one is that I have an economics background.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So, the ultimate one is, well, we need to make sure teachers are paid fairly. They're an incredibly important profession. Teachers pay has been falling consistently year on year. It's now kind of not particularly competitive profession, especially kind of experienced teachers.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So, well, let's kind of make sure teachers are well paid. So, that's kind of the first one. And then the second one, I think, really links to kind of their work-life balance, their workload, and also the school leadership.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So, it's the number one factor that determines whether or not a teacher leaves or stays in school is actually the school leadership. So, actually, like similar to kind of the work you do, Toby, actually, training and supporting school leaders to help utilize the potential of their staff is incredibly important. And one of the things that I found really fascinating is this kind of like matching effect.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So, it's just 'cause a teacher doesn't work well with a particular head teacher doesn't mean there's an issue with any of those. Sometimes it's just different leadership styles require different people. It's about finding kind of the school leader and the management that you actually work well with.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So, if you're listening to this and going, I'm really clashing with my manager, this doesn't mean there's necessarily an issue with your manager. And it doesn't necessarily mean there's an issue with you. Sometimes you just need to find the right type of relationship.

Toby Mildon: I can relate to that 'cause a friend of mine that I went to university with actually changed careers to become a teacher very recently. So, we studied marketing together. She went into a marketing career and then quite recently retrained to be a teacher.

Toby Mildon: She's now an A-level business studies teacher. It resonates with me 'cause some of the conversations I've had with her about her experience of now working in education compared to industry, working in a school environment is actually how impactful the leadership is, whether you feel supported as a teacher in that particular school or not, or it's really fascinating actually. So, yeah, you're right.

Toby Mildon: There needs to be a lot of work done around leadership behaviors. Yeah. And I like what you were saying around the lack of diversity amongst teachers and the impact that that's having on students and the outcomes of those students.

Toby Mildon: And it just reminded me of this famous saying, and I can't quite remember who said it, but basically the saying is that you cannot be what you can't see. So, if you can't see yourself, it's hard for you to think of your future position. And we get this a lot in businesses where somebody joins an organization, they look up at the top of the organization, they don't see anyone that's like them.

Toby Mildon: And subconsciously, they're telling themselves, I'm not sure I've got a future here. I don't know if I can make my way to the top of the business 'cause there's nobody like me. And as you were describing that, I was thinking that when I went to school, did I have any disabled teachers? I had one teacher who had arthritis, so I think technically she would have been considered disabled, but I had no visibly disabled teachers.

Toby Mildon: There was no teacher in my school that was a wheelchair user, for example.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah.

Toby Mildon: Yeah. It's fascinating.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah, that's kind of crazy. So, yes, I think one of the things that I was speaking about is the importance of these role model effects.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So, in the school area, this means that students have different or higher expectations for themselves if they have a teacher who has similar characteristics to them, 'cause the idea of this is saying, as you nicely pointed out, that, hey, look, if I can see someone who has the same characteristics as me, they went to university, they've been successful now, they're a teacher, why can't I do that? And I think you're right, that translates really nicely to business. If I can't see anyone in management who looks like me, that's gonna have a negative effect on my expectations and what I expect for myself. And actually, I really like how you're mentioning your own experiences.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: I haven't really looked at if there are many disabled teachers, and this is something that actually does confuse me, 'cause there is no reason why. 'cause schools should be highly accessible places, we have disabled students, why don't we have disabled teachers? And maybe there could be something going on there with a hiring process by which teachers go, well, I've never seen a disabled teacher, this person is disabled, and therefore they may be evaluated lower than they should be. So that's, I think, something really fascinating.

Toby Mildon: Can I add that to your research pile? 

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah, yeah.

Toby Mildon: This part looking into? 

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah, genuinely, Toby, I think that would be absolutely fascinating, 'cause as far as I'm aware, I don't think anyone's looked at this.

Toby Mildon: This could be your next book.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: And then I can come back and nicely plug it on Amazon for some money.

Toby Mildon: A friend of mine years ago, she's got the same disability as me. She was a teacher, she was a maths teacher. She left education and now works for a disability charity. And yeah, but I don't know many visibly disabled teachers. So I think that would be really interesting research.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah.

Toby Mildon: I mean, what is your overall or overarching intention of the work that you're doing? 

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah. So I mean, so I'm really fortunate. So I'm doing work that I'm interested in, and a lot of other people are interested in this type of work. Yeah. And I've been quoted in the House of Commons, which is really cool. So I'm on Hansard, which I've screenshotted it. I'm very, very excited about that. I'm fortunate enough to be kind of on the front page of a Times, the Telegraph, I've been on kind of radio, ITV News. So I'm really fortunate that I have got quite a nice kind of presence in the policy space. One of my hopeful impacts or intentions of my work is to make sure that people have access to good research. So I think one of the things that kind of we know is that there's a lot of research out there, but it's a shame to say, not all of it's good. So actually quite a bit of it's quite bad.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So I think it's about kind of ensuring that good research is out there and understood and listened to, while we kind of make sure that we can kind of move the lower quality research or it's kind of to the side. So I think so, yeah. So one of the things I want to do, or hopefully I'm doing is kind of showing people that actually not all research is created equal and make sure that kind of a research that is good is presented to the people who make decisions. So they actually are more informed and actually more well-informed about what choices we should make. Yeah. So that's kind of big picture.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Impact wise, obviously my goal is to motivate the next generation of young people to go out there, to go into industry, to go into businesses and hopefully change the world for the good. So I'm really, so one of the things I encourage in all my students is kind of critical thinking and kind of critically evaluating the problems people face in their day-to-day lives and think about creative solutions to help solve these problems. And if they do this well, hopefully this will result in a very profitable business.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: So that's kind of the avenue, particularly where we go down, 'cause I know some business schools and some teachers kind of encourage students to use kind of these behavioral science techniques to like win the consumer to kind of like manipulate behavior and kind of get consumers. But my attitude is more about, well, how do we develop products that actually make people's lives better? And then how do we advertise that in the right way? And that's how actually we want to be making money and creating businesses.

Toby Mildon: Well, that's so critical for entrepreneurship and business. I mean, entrepreneurs, in my view, are problem solvers.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah, 100%. [laughter]

Toby Mildon: And then they build teams to solve those problems.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah.

Toby Mildon: And that's probably as simple as you can make it, really.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah, yeah. No, you're absolutely honest. So one of the things I love, so I teach a core module on the Masters in Management program and my assessments. So I can say this as both a teacher and someone who is a lifelong student, my assessments are so much fun. So I basically, I mean, we'll see if my students agree with me, but I essentially give them a real world problem to solve and basically just say, there is no right or wrong answer here. Apply the tools that we've been discussing and try to solve this problem. And you get some amazing answers and you're really like, these guys are so clever. So this is like the joy of being at Warwick. The students are so clever and it's so much fun 'cause you can really push them. And like the answers they give and their responses are really impressive. So it's, yeah, it's an absolute pleasure to do. I'm very lucky that I get to do what I love.

Toby Mildon: That's really, really cool. So the penultimate question I ask everybody is what does inclusive growth mean to you? 

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah. So I think this is a brilliant question. And I think in my mind, this is all about creating an environment where everybody, regardless of their characteristics, if they're disabled, everything kind of can come together and we can hear these voices to develop both as individuals, as a company and as a society. 'cause if we're not hearing from everyone, we're missing really valuable inputs that can help inform and make better decisions. And I think that's really consistent with what my research shows. People are biased in how they make decisions and actually having a more representative or balanced group of people making these decisions leads to better outcomes for everybody.

Toby Mildon: Brilliant. And finally, if the person listening to us right now wants to follow your work, maybe they wanna just reach out to you and ask you some questions around bias and decision-making, or maybe they're even interested in studying at the Warwick Business School, what should they do? 

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah. So I'm going to create a LinkedIn account. So please connect with me there. It would be really great to be in touch. And also I have all my work published and publicly available on Google Scholar. So you're welcome to have a look at my work out there. And you're also welcome to just email me and I'm always happy to have a chat.

Toby Mildon: Brilliant. Well, Josh, thanks ever so much for joining me today. It's been really fascinating to sit down and talk to you about the topics we've discussed.

Dr. Joshua Fullard: Yeah, no, it's been fantastic. Thank you so much, Toby, for inviting me. I've really enjoyed it.

Toby Mildon: You're welcome. And thank you for tuning into this episode with Joshua and myself. Hopefully you found it really interesting and you've taken away some ideas and inspiration that you can perhaps apply in your own organization, addressing some of the biases that we make, maybe thinking about who's good looking or not good looking in your organization and the impact that that might be having on career development and performance management and things like that. It is an interesting topic.

Toby Mildon: It is something that researchers have looked into and how we perceive other people and how it does affect our judgments and the stereotypes that we make and the prejudice decisions that we make and ultimately discrimination that that can lead to. So I know we were kind of jovial about it today, but it is quite a serious topic in terms of the impact that it has on people's lives. So thanks ever so much for tuning in today.

Toby Mildon: It's been lovely to have you join us and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode, which will be coming up very soon. Until then, take good care of yourself. Bye-bye.

[music]

Intro: Thank you for listening to the Inclusive Growth Show. For further information and resources from Toby and his team, head on over to our website at mildon.co.uk.