Unconscious Bias

What is Unconscious Bias?

Committing to an equitable workplace is where the culture builds respect, fosters inclusiveness, diversity and embraces the unique skills and qualities of all employees. It's everybody’s responsibility to foster and promote inclusiveness and increasing your skills and knowledge of unconscious bias will help develop an appreciation of the nature and prevalence of bias to foster inclusiveness.

This information will complement informative lunch and learns and help you explore some of your biases and how to acknowledge them within and outside of the workplace.

Unconscious bias is a mental shortcut made up of attitudes or stereotypes you develop over time which we all use to make decisions. Ultimately, these biases help the brain create shortcuts for the decision-making process and help detect apparent threats. If unconscious bias goes unchecked it can lead to fixed generalised views of how people should act or even negative out-spoken (or inner-spoken) attitude towards a person or group making a plentiful ground for growing stereotypes, prejudice, discrimination. Unconscious biases is everywhere from the neighbourhood we choose, the close friends that we have, to the companies we choose to work for.

How does this work? Various research has shown that many biases are formed throughout life and held at the subconscious level, mainly through societal and parental conditioning as we gather millions of bits of information and our brain processes that information in a certain way – unconsciously formatting it into familiar patterns. It can be difficult accepting or acknowledging it but we all do it from gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, body size, profession any many more. These factors all influence the assessments that we make of people and form the basis of our relationship with others, and the world around us.

Also, here is an article about the business benefits of Diversity and Inclusion learning, and why Virtual Reality with perspective-taking actually makes a difference: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unconscious-bias-training-diversity-through-virtual-reality-martin/

Types of Bias

Affinity Bias

This is the bias towards people "who make me comfortable" and biased against people "who make me uncomfortable". In other words, the inclination to give a higher rating to people with similar interests, skills and backgrounds as you.

A preference we connect with others who share similar interests, experiences or backgrounds. This bias occurs because your brain sees them as familiar and relatable, and we all want to be around people we can relate to, its easier.

If interviewing a potential candidate, actively take note of the similarities you share with the candidate so that you can differentiate

between attributes that may cloud your judgement and the concrete skills, experiences and unique qualities that would contribute to your team as a ‘culture add’ rather than ‘culture fit.’

Attribution bias

This bias is when you make an assumption about others based on a characteristic without having all the data needed to be accurate. An example is establishing judgements around one particular characteristic such as someone’s age, the roots of their name, their physical attractiveness or size, and making assumptions about what they can or can’t do based on that characteristic.

Regardless, you made an assumption based on only a small amount of data.

It is important to focus on objective

facts. When evaluating someone's individual achievements or weaknesses, focus on the factual situational information you have in front of you. If you start making assumptions about why something happened, you run the risk of incorrectly describing another person's motives or character.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias refers to how people primarily search for bits of evidence that back up their opinions, rather than looking at the whole picture. Its leads to selective observation, meaning you overlook other information that contradicts your initial evidence and interpret new information in a way that confirms a person’s pre-existing beliefs.

Think like a scientist! When researchers ask questions, they try to form their hypothesis in ways that seeks to disconfirm rather than confirm their initial beliefs. Every time you have an impression about someone, go out and seek evidence that they are the opposite or entirely different from what you suspect. When collecting feedback from others, pay close attention to the feedback that goes against your beliefs.

Conformity Bias

The tendency that people have to act in a similar way to those around them, changing what they believe in, or their values, in order to be included in a group.

The problematic consensus that is characteristic of groupthink may be fuelled by a particular agenda or it may be due to group members valuing harmony and coherence above critical thought.

Ultimately it hinders innovation as this bias doesn’t support critical thinking and creativity.

Healthy opposition has been linked to more creative thinking and ultimately greater innovation. It can be helpful to ask one person in a meeting, workshop to deliberately play devil’s advocate and argue with the solutions proposed by the majority is one strategy that has been shown to be effective against conformity bias.

Another method is to use de Bono’s six hats approach to help teams get used to identifying bias in their thinking and decision making.

Halo and Horns Effect Bias

The tendency to put someone on a pedestal or think more highly of them after learning something impressive about them (halo bias), or conversely, perceiving someone negatively after learning something unfavourable about them (horns bias). For example, letting a colleague's friendly sense of humour override their poor communication skills.

When assessing someone’s performance make sure at least 2 different aspects of performance to get a holistic view so that one awesome or awful trait or skill doesn’t overshadow

everything else.

A good defence against the horns and halo bias is to adhere to rule: Every idea must stand on its own merit regardless of who proposes it.

Primacy and Recency Bias

The primacy bias and the recency bias are the two main components of a broader concept known as the serial position effect. The serial position effect says that when given a list of information and later asked to recall that information, the items at the beginning (primacy) and the items at the end (recency) are more likely to be recalled than the items in the middle.

An example is when reviewing a colleague's performance, reviewer focus on information learned early on in the relationship only, like first impressions (Primacy) or the reviewer tend to focus on the most recent time period instead of the total time period (Recency).

Aside from being aware of the biases, you should also focus on gathering as much information as possible when first making a decision and taking their time to avoid the bias and its effects on decision making. In

performance reviews, it’s important to

document performance at different points in time throughout the time period. Did someone just complete a 3-month engagement? Send their peers a request for feedback so you can get some data on how well they did.

What are the benefits of addressing unconscious bias?

Unconscious bias isn’t an isolated concept detached from the world outside and inside of work. If unconscious bias goes unchecked, it can lead to a disruption in the way we work together and lead to:

talented people being left out and lack of development and career progression,
diverse voices not being heard in meetings and decisions can be impaired,
employee’s not able to fully contribute to the organisation,
creativity and productivity may be compromised.

Where there is bias (conscious or unconscious) in the workplace, we continue to recruit, promote, allocate work, and manage performance with filters on our thinking. We cannot change what we do not see or acknowledge, but we can change conscious attitudes and beliefs. Interrupting unconscious bias can therefore:

improve decision making,
create innovative solution,
improve peoples health and wellbeing and
create a positive and healthy workplace culture.

What can you do about unconscious bias?

When it comes to creating inclusive and diverse workplaces we need to look inward first. Everyone has unconscious biases, the goal is to try and bring them to our consciousness and navigate them. In order to provide a more inclusive and empathetic work environment, some considerations and ideas to work with:

Simply being aware of unconscious bias can immediately start to reduce our reliance on generalisations or stereotypes. Look out and monitor your self-talk.
Remain open-minded and continue learning to hold yourself and others accountable.
Demonstrate tolerance and patience and choose to listen, pause, and consider first. Offer the benefit of the doubt and don't jump to conclusions.
Make thoughtful impressions and decisions while challenging your own default views. Take all options into consideration, not just your "gut".
Seek feedback and choose to use it and don't avoid the conversation, seek it out. Ask for the feedback you need, not want as this will achieve greater understanding for yourself.
Inquiring into others’ thinking (having a meaningful dialogue when challenging our own and others’ points of view)

Challenging your beliefs and assumptions is never easy, but can be achieved using:

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