Recently, while arranging a local government ‘meet the candidate’ event, someone questioned whether an independent emcee might have an unconscious bias towards one or more of the participants.
Now, I thought the whole ‘unconscious bias’ train had finally arrived at its final station. It appears that I am sadly mistaken. It has been bandied around to, in my opinion, bully and shame people.
Many people jumped on this gravy train and set up unconscious bias training teaching companies and the public service how they could identify their bias and how to overcome them. Whether they existed or not.
To provide a working definition I turned to ChatGPT:
“Unconscious bias, often used interchangeably with implicit bias, refers to the biases that operate below the level of conscious awareness. These biases can influence our judgments, decisions, and behaviours without us being aware of them. They are shaped by our experiences, background, culture, and societal stereotypes.
Unconscious bias can manifest in various contexts, such as hiring, performance evaluations, and interpersonal interactions, leading to unequal treatment or judgments based on factors like race, gender, age, or socioeconomic status. Recognizing and addressing unconscious bias is important for fostering fairness and inclusivity in personal and professional environments.”
This definition is a good starting point, but we need to look to the origins for a more nuanced discussion.
Unconscious bias stems from the work of Kahnemann and Tversky, and Kahnemann’s book Thinking Fast and slow. The objective of their research was to identify intuitive errors in judgement. This led to the development of two systems of thinking.
- System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.
- System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.
Either system is appropriate for making decisions. System 1 is where people attribute unconscious bias, as this is the domain where quick decisions are made. Often these decisions are based on life experience, context, and life experience. For example, if you are in a suburban street and heard the clip clop of hooves. Would you think horse or zebra? Most likely horse, as it is rare to see a zebra in our streets.
Or condiser that you are walking along a street in Melbourne and a group of teenage boys start walking toward you. You see them and cross the road to avoid them. Why, because in the current climate where the media is portraying all young men as violent, you instinctivel make an assessment that you will feel safer crossing the road.
In each of these scenarios system1 thinking works here. Decisions made on experience and context.
Which leads me to question the belief that unconscious bias exists ‘in hiring, performance evaluations, and interpersonal interactions, leading to unequal treatment or judgments based on factors like race, gender, age, or socioeconomic statuses”
If an employer looks at an application and sees a non-Anglo name, or gender, or cultural heritage, and decides to reject the application just in that basis alone. Then isn’t that a conscious bias? I suggest it is.
Others suggest, and I accept to a degree, that it may be unconscious bias if they are not aware that they are specifically rejecting the application on an immutable characteristic. However, I posit that any negative bias cannot be acknowledged as it is unconscious. It is only through engagement with System 2, can any issues of error in judgement be identified and amended. However, that requires a conscious choice to reflect on your thinking. Some people just don’t want to.
What are your thoughts on unconscious bias?