People always see the world through the lens of their own identity. This lens is shaped by cognitive thought patterns that affect judgement. Unconscious bias is considered one of the major barriers to diversity & inclusion strategies. That's why I'll explain how you can make fairer and better decisions on the job with five examples of unconscious bias.
Biases in the brain ensure that we can unintentionally discriminate against people - even if you are an open person with good intentions. Unconscious biases are prejudicial judgements and perceptual distortions about individuals or groups. Everyone has them: On the one hand, because they are cognitive structures that help us to prevent sensory overload and to order the world. On the other hand, because we have learned many stereotypical images through our socialisation.
To make more objective and fairer decisions, these five examples of unconscious bias are important for you:
Halo effect
The halo effect causes one fact or characteristic to outshine everything else. If you perceive a person as beautiful, you may also perceive this person as more competent than, for example, a person who is overweight. The norm-beautiful person therefore has to make less effort to appear competent.
The same applies when evaluating CVs: If the candidate has worked for a brand that is known and positively associated with you (e.g. Google), then you will evaluate the person's competencies more positively overall. Although the mere fact that a person has worked at Google does not mean anything. Google "gives" the person applying a halo, even though he or she has not yet demonstrated the relevant skills, for example.
To do: Structure yourself especially well when hiring a new person, for example. Structure helps to recognize the effect of unconscious biases and to change them through more conscious perception. To minimize the effect of biases, you can't avoid structured hiring. Read more about Inclusive Hiring here. We are happy to support you.
Horns effect
The other side of the halo effect is the Horns effect. It means that one characteristic or assignment of a person that is marked as negative outshines all others: for example, if a CV of a person contains an employer who is negatively associated with you.
Or if you don't even work with older people on your team because of a negative stereotypical thought like "older people don't have digital literacy." These perceptual biases can cause you to simply overlook certain information, skills, and talents - similar to confirmation bias.
To do: Be aware of these two biases - the Halo & Horns effect - and ask yourself in which situation this bias might have influenced your judgment negatively.
Confirmation Bias
With confirmation bias, we unconsciously confirm our previously made assumptions. For example, when a new intern forgets to do an important task. And you unconsciously keep looking for evidence yourself that he's just not that good a fit.
To do: Break through this unconscious bias by also looking for examples that refute your perhaps entrenched thesis. This can often be achieved by talking to others who have not experienced the trainee's misfortune and may have a completely different picture.
Groupthink Bias
Humans are social beings. It is essential for our survival to belong to groups. For the sake of harmony, an unconscious groupthink can often creep in. For example, when bosses first present their ideas in meetings, we tend to try to confirm them unconsciously.
To do: As a leader, it can help to keep a low profile in idea meetings, not to pretend anything and to be open and appreciative of the team's ideas. Variation: Each time, your team appoints people who are supposed to refute the ideas and explicitly argue against them.
In-group or affinity bias
In-group bias is a bias in favour of one's own group. According to neuroscientific studies, we even unconsciously feel more empathy for this group. An in-group can be a small group, such as a dance group, but also a social group affiliation, such as being white-German, a cis woman or non-disabled. People who are attributed to the out-group experience disadvantages as a result. The in-group bias is fed by historical continuities and hierarchies, e.g. white supremacy .
"Us" versus "the Others
These categorizations and hierarchies form the basis for our social identities. This is also accompanied by a division into an "us" and "the others". And depending on which group has the social, political and economic power, this has fatal consequences for "the others".
Social identity and groups
The social psychologist Henri Tajfel once demonstrated the very rapid categorization into an "us" and "them" in an experiment called the Minimal Group Procedure. In this experiment, unknown people are divided into groups on the basis of minimal information: for example, on the basis of preference for a particular painting or on the basis of a coin toss. Within a few minutes, the subjects tended to regard their own group as superior to the other group and to gain advantages. His theories from the 1970/80s have since been confirmed in numerous other studies.
Of course, this also has consequences for team dynamics in companies. Because even on the job, you are probably unconsciously most likely to surround yourself with people who are like yourself. The examples of unconscious bias described above clearly show this. And if your company is already very homogeneous and majority-socialised, it becomes much more difficult for marginalised groups to feel included.
You can clearly sense the in-group bias in multilingual teams with different first languages. During breaks, people often prefer to meet with colleagues who share the same first language, e.g. German speakers who prefer to meet with other German speakers.
Now that you know some Unconscious Bias examples - these are your to dos:
- Reflect on your identity. Where do you possibly belong to the big social ingroups - and where not? So-called privilege checks, such as this one, can help. The tests are largely based on the research of the US scientist and feminist Peggy Mcintosh.
- Approach people who you perceive as different - outside your team, your department, your company and regardless of your first language. Personal contact creates a more individualized perception of the groups you perceive as different. This can also mean diversifying your social media feed and subscribing to accounts that give you a new perspective.
Safer spaces such as employee networks are an exception to this. These are special places of rest and refuelling for people who are particularly marked as "the others" and experience social marginalisation.
For example, if your company has an employee network for Black people, as a white person or non-Black person of colour you should ask beforehand if the event is open to you. A similar example: events organised by LGBTQI+ networks. They are initially only open to these people from the LGBTQI+ community. Unless the event is announced as "open to straight people/straight allies".
Understanding these examples of unconscious bias will certainly help you. But generally speaking, D&I work means scrutinizing your decisions and thoughts more closely. Ensure bias-free structures in the company, e.g. in HR processes or performance appraisals. No one is free from preconceptions. We are happy to support you in examining where your processes could be influenced by bias. Only if we work on the processes at the same time will we truly create a bias-free environment. Unconscious bias training alone is not enough.
