As part of my ongoing series to make business psychology models more simple and practical, I seek to address the question:
What is Unconscious Bias?
Picture this. You are on a plane. It is still on the tarmac and passengers are boarding. You are sitting in your seat at the front of the plane, trying and failing to get comfortable. Suddenly, an armed terrorist storms on to the plane. He fights his way into the cockpit and is holding a gun to the pilot’s head.
Got it? Can you see it?
OK, is the pilot male? If you are like most people (myself included), the answer would be yes. And why not? After all, 95% of pilots are male. It is a sound and educated guess. But, it is nothing more than a guess. Unfortunately, our subconscious often substitutes these guesses for absolute truths. That all pilots are male. That all pilots should be male. This is unconscious bias at work.
Unconscious bias is a natural human tendency to make assumptions, leap to conclusions and rely on rough rules of thumb when making decisions. To give it its formal term, an unconscious bias is a way of thinking that can lead to confident but often inaccurate conclusions.
And there are a lot of them. A lot! To list but a few, affinity bias is a natural tendency to look more favourably on those who are like us. Confirmatory bias and selective attention results in us actively seeking out information that confirms our judgements, and subconsciously ignoring that which goes against our expectations. Availability bias, or the tendency to overestimate the importance of information simply because it is more available to us. Priming – or using subtle cues to influence another person’s views – is what allows personal biases to go viral. The list goes on.
Taken together, the simple reality is that we are all biased. Me, you, everyone. They make us human. They enable us to navigate an increasingly complex world. They are products of our evolution, our upbringing and societal influences. But they are imperfect tools that can be mistakenly used for precision tasks.
For example, take selective attention. You can’t function with it. You couldn’t drive a car if you had to consciously attune yourself to every last bit of information. Instead, your subconscious filters that which it considers important to attend to – traffic lights, speed cameras, pedestrians.
But apply this to situations where a full evaluation of the data is important and you run into problems. Let’s say you are interviewing someone for a job in your team. You have been told in advance that they are “a bit of an introvert”. This primes certain stereotypes about introverts (shy, geeky, socially awkward, whatever) and these expectations prompt you to look for information that confirms your beliefs, while simultaneously selectively detuning information that doesn’t fit. In this one simple, realistic and frustratingly common example, you have fallen afoul of numerous biases which taken together limit your ability to see the individual for who they are, but instead to see them as the stereotype you hung around their neck.
Many of my clients are focused on equality, diversity and inclusion. They invest time, money and resources in ensuring fairness and respect. But without a recognition that we (and all our associated biases) can often be the weakest link in our success, we will struggle to achieve the changes we so consciously desire.
Oh, and one final question, what was the ethnicity of the terrorist? I bet I can take a good guess.
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