The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias

“We redefine what it means to be a good person as someone who is trying to be better, as opposed to someone who is allowing themselves to believe in the illusion that they are always a good person.”

Dolly Chugh and her collaborators in the field of social psychology eschew binary terms, such as good and bad, and instead focus on an ongoing measure of learning and growth that she calls, good-ish. Being good-ish means being good some of the time, but not all the time. Perfection is not possible, but growth is both possible and necessary.

“The less we worry about being good people, the better people we will be.”

Chugh argues that worrying about being good is unproductive, sets people up to fail, and leads to disappointment. She takes a nuanced approach to goodness, removing the focus from perception and placing it on an active, ongoing reality.

“It is easy to write off anger as sour grapes […] it was not about the grape; it was about the inequity.”

As Chugh observes, anger is a natural reaction to inequality. Instead of retreating from the anger of marginalized people with offense or shame, Chugh urges builders to engage their growth mindset and approach that anger as a learning opportunity.