Seeing Beyond Ourselves

Riddle me this: You are standing in front of a mirror alongside another person. As you look into the mirror, you notice that the person next to you has a reflection, but you don’t. Now you’re pretty sure you are not a vampire, so what could be happening? Well, this is how bias commonly works. It is something we can readily see in others, but unless aware of its nature, cannot see within yourself. Everyone displays bias, and much like the reflection of different people in a mirror, each person exhibits their bias in a manner unique to them.

Put simply, bias is a habitual mode of emotional response, either favorable or unfavorable, towards an object, person, or event. These responses can be either intentional or unintentional, and are a part of human nature. Individual biases are as different as there are humans and are influenced by a person’s background, personal experiences, societal stereotypes, and cultural context.

Bias comes in many forms, with the two main types being conscious and unconscious bias. These types manifest themselves in both people and events, such as the media and personal preferences. There are other forms of bias as well, some of them being anchoring bias, confirmation bias, affinity bias, availability bias, and the halo effect.

Both conscious and unconscious bias can be found in the other forms of partiality, so we’ll start by taking a closer look at these.

Conscious bias, or explicit bias, is a type of preference that you are aware of its existence. For instance, if I know blue is my favorite color, I would not be surprised to see myself gravitating to artwork that includes it as a foundational color. Recognizing your personal biases is helpful when discussing topics that may be controversial, because it can get you a step closer to looking at the other sides of the issue. Of course, if you do not take into account the bias you are aware of on a topic, then you move forward with the intent of ignoring the influence of your particular bias when trying to uncover the truth of an issue.

As the word suggests, unconscious bias, or implicit bias, is the opposite of this. These preferences work outside a person’s awareness, and thus, their control. They are difficult to identify in oneself and may influence your actions and behaviors more than conscious biases and do so without you realizing it. Implicit biases are formed due to the way humans learn and live.

1.     Our brains categorize information to assist in learning. This unconscious and natural tendency has us automatically assigning new information into a particular group and then noting a positive or negative association with it. The unintended and undesirable effect this has is to cause us to overgeneralize in many cases.

2.     We rely on mental shortcuts. Every day each of us is required to make thousands of decisions. Because of this, we make many “automatic” judgments so as not to be overwhelmed. This allows us to make swift judgments using little mental energy.

3.     Our personal experiences imprint on us.  Starting at birth, our lives are molded around our upbringing and social experiences, both direct and indirect. These are deeply ingrained, many of them becoming unconscious to us.

Implicit bias, due to its nature of being outside a person’s awareness, can seem like a virtual impossibility to try to identify and change when needed. Michelle Gouldsberry in Betterwork suggests that working to understand people who are different than you is one way to mitigate negative effects of unconscious bias. Getting to know people with different backgrounds, be it ethnic, religious, racial, orientation, etc., can help us understand them, and offer us information that can challenge a negative assumption one may have. Knowing others dissimilar from us can allow us to see things from different perspectives.

Of course, in order for this method to work, a person’s own bias must be recognized. As with the mirror, finding our own reflections of bias may not be readily evident.  To overcome these blindspots, we must be open to the notion that our point of view may be incorrect, and we must come with a true desire to analyze other perspectives. By being open to this, each one of us gets closer to overcoming any negative bias that may impede our search for truth.