Unconscious Bias
Unconscious Bias
"I think unconscious bias is one of the hardest things to get at." Ruth Bader Ginsburg
OK, the media is biased — but so are we... The cold truth is that we have a tendency to make snap judgements, and in doing so, we rely on our experience and our ‘gut instinct’. And even when we think we are making more considered judgements, our implicit or unconscious biases can and does affect our views.
This whole fascinating topic is explored in a new book by Pragya Agarwal, ‘SWAY: Unravelling Unconscious Bias’, and these notes are based on the analysis presented there.[1]
In many areas of life, in medical, legal, educational, as well as social contexts, our biases have consequences, expressed in the attitudes people display and the actions they take.[2]
Sterotyping
Agarwal argues that positive bias is important in evolutionary terms, for example, in encouraging us to look after our children...
We are social creatures who have evolved to live in communities, thus the adaptation of loyalty to an in-group and suspicion of out-groups. Indeed, we are influenced by the judgements of the group we belong to.
In evolutionary terms, we developed speedy reactions to individuals in order to assess which group they belong to — and thus their trustworthiness. We can make assessments about the trustworthiness of new people within milliseconds (i.e. too short a time for rational decision-making to kick in). Often we don’t even realise that we are assigning people membership of different groups, such as race, academic status, accent, social class and gender. We are influenced too by aspects of people’s appearance: facial symmetry, height and weight.
Stereotyping is one of the brain’s shortcuts. And we tend to remember the information that confirms our stereotype better than that which challenges it.
The Brain as Super Processor
According to Agarwal, our brains process an estimated 11 million bits of information every second. However, scientist’s reckon that our conscious minds can handle only a tiny fraction of this information flow, thus the tendency to develop short-cuts. We can make assessments about new people within milliseconds. Being aware of this tendency should at least alert us to the dangers...
As Agarwal says: “When societies experience big and rapid change, a frequent response is for people to narrowly define who qualifies as a full member of society.” And she argues that in the current political climate of anxiety and fear, we are witnessing an increase in ‘othering’ driven by politicians, the media and social networks. The crucial thing is not to apply those stereotypes in our interactions with people, rather we need to understand the effects of uncritical stereotyping and the consequences it leads to. Stereotypes can be a matter of life and death.
Stereotyping influences people’s lives in all sorts of ways: it affects performance (e.g. girls’ performance at maths); it affects life chances (e.g. medical diagnoses and treatments offered); it influences perceptions of attractiveness — the skin whitening industry's billboard poster shown here is in Bangladesh; and it influences the way the police and even the courts treat you/us.
The good news is that Agarwal’s study suggests that biases are learned (not hard-wired) so they can be unlearned. The brain can change with experience and environmental influences. Bias recognized is, as someone once observed, a bias sterilized.[3]
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Notes
1 I'm indebted to Susan Guiver for her notes on Agarwal's book in preparing this page .
2 Unconsious bias should not be confused with confirmation bias. As Kyle Hill has written: “We tend to accept information that confirms our prior beliefs and ignore or discredit information that does not. This confirmation bias settles over our eyes like distorting spectacles for everything we look at."
3 The full quote is: "Fortunately for serious minds, a bias recognized is a bias sterilized." It's by Benjamin Haydon, an 18th century writer (and painer).
