"Diverse Teams Feel Less Comfortable — and That’s Why They Perform Better"

"With so much at stake, why aren’t these companies making more headway? One reason could be that, despite the evidence about their results, homogenous teams just feel more effective. In addition, people believe that diverse teams breed greater conflict than they actually do. Bringing these biases to light may enable ways to combat them... 

There’s a common bias that psychologists call the fluency heuristic: We prefer information that is processed more easily, or fluently, judging it to be truer or more beautiful. The effect partially explains that we gain greater appreciation of songs or paintings when they become familiar because they’re more easily processed. The fluency heuristic leads many people to study incorrectly; they often simply reread the material. The information becomes more familiar without much effort, and so they feel that they’re learning... 

There’s another bias at play here, too: A 2015 paper in Organization Science, summarized in this HBR article, suggests that people overestimate the amount of conflict that actually exists on diverse teams... 

research suggests that when people with different perspectives are brought together, people may seek to gloss over those differences in the interest of group harmony — when, in fact, differences should actually be taken seriously and highlighted.

https://hbr.org/2016/09/diverse-teams-feel-less-comfortable-and-thats-why-they-perform-better?referral=03758&cm_vc=rr_item_page.top_right

At some point I'm my childhood, I learned that I had to actively put groups of white people at ease if I was trying to join them. Sitting next to new people in school, joining a new extracurricular, whatever... Let them know that I wasn't going to be disruptive, that I would play along. Because there is a way that people shrink back and close off a bit then relax back out when you successfully project casual safety. 

FB: "This type of unconscious bias can clearly have a significant impact not only on hiring but also on the ways in which leaders create teams and encourage collaboration.  Without realizing it, they may be reluctant to add diversity to a team or to assign colleagues with different backgrounds to work together, in response to an (overblown) fear of the tension and difficulty that could ensue."