Constructing and deconstructing bias: modeling privilege and mentorship in agent-based simulations

Abstract: Bias exists in how we pick leaders, who we perceive as being influential, and who we interact with, not only in society, but in organizational contexts. Drawing from leadership emergence and social influence theories, we investigate potential interventions that support diverse leaders. Using agent-based simulations, we model a collective search process on a fitness landscape. Agents combine individual and social learning, and are represented as a feature vector blending relevant (e.g., individual learning characteristics) and irrelevant (e.g., race or gender) features. Agents use rational principles of learning to estimate feature weights on the basis of performance predictions, which are used to dynamically define social influence in their network. We show how biases arise based on historic privilege, but can be drastically reduced through the use of an intervention (e.g. mentorship). This work provides important insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying bias construction and deconstruction, while pointing towards real-world interventions to be tested in future empirical work.