Breaking Bias: Where Stereotypes and Prejudices Come From―and the Science-Backed Method to Unravel Them

Imagine a world without bias

Imagine a world where all human beings can truly belong, just as they are, and unleash their full potential.

Take a moment to imagine how you feel in such a world. Not what you think about it, or whether you believe it’s possible, but how you feel.

This is the proposition that opens Breaking Bias. It’s your invitation to embark on an experiential journey with the power to radically change your daily life and, by extension, the world we share. Anu Gupta offers a page-turning deep dive into how bias is learned―and a strikingly original and highly effective set of tools to un-learn it. Breaking Bias is one of the few books that go beyond examining the history of bias to offer actual training in how to reduce bias. It’s also the only book of its kind written by an author with Anu’s unique intersectional identities: a gay brown immigrant with Buddhist, Christian, and Hindu roots who is also an American lawyer and scholar of bias with two decades’ worth of research and teaching experience and lived experiences that span the globe.

Anu takes you on a deep-time journey to explore human identities and to recognize that breaking bias is the key to unlocking multiple crises in our world, from racism, sexism, and classism to burnout, loneliness, and climate change. Then he offers his signature PRISM toolkit―a set of contemplative tools grounded in Buddhist wisdom and backed by science―to help you dismantle learned bias within yourself and in the world around you, moment by moment.