What is Unconscious Bias?

Unconscious or implicit bias training is one of the positive steps that an organization can bring to support employees, at every level, to acknowledge, understand and handle hidden biases that can direct to poor decision-making.

Some typical examples of unconscious bias believe that male employees are better at physical work, that women will exit the workforce after becoming a parent, or presuming that individuals or specific groups have a particular skill because of their ethnicity.

What's unconscious bias training??

Unconscious bias (also called implicit bias). Unconscious biases are the underlying stereotypes and beliefs you hold that can affect your actions or decisions. You're judging people and situations without being completely aware of them.

Your unconscious biases can direct to discriminative behavior based on other people's race, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, name, weight, height, or religion. This can be particularly dangerous in the workplace, primarily when recruiting, hiring, and promoting employees.

That's why organizations implement unconscious bias training — sometimes directed more broadly as diversity training — to support people in understanding their unconscious biases. If you participate in one of these training sessions, you can expect to understand some ways to recognize and overcome your unconscious biases by disrupting these underlying thinking patterns.

Why Do We Have Unconscious Biases?

Let's put it; unconscious biases are a survival mechanism that allows our brains to sift through large quantities of sensory information and controls our perceptions of people and circumstances and how we respond.

Studies have found that biases often develop outside of our control. As we learn more about preferences, psychologists believe it's a hard-wired aspect of our brain and behavior. Our ancient minds know survival can depend on snap decisions, so biases support making these decisions quickly—often without our knowing. We have so much information coming at us. It's much easier for our minds to continue to follow what's familiar versus what is not.?

Companies are stripping the demographic information from resumes before hiring managers even see them. This technique helps to hire managers judge applicants more objectively and reduces opportunities for bias to influence a hiring decision. But the issue is that unconscious biases extend well beyond hiring—affecting staff development, promotions, and retention. So how can we continue to remove bias in everything we do?

Can Mindfulness Practice Reduce Biases?

The practice of mindfulness creates more conscious, moment-to-moment awareness of ourselves and our environment. When we're mindful, we are "in the moment" and not thinking about the past or imagining what could happen in the future.?

Let's look at a few types of unconscious bias:

Correspondence Bias is when you see others' actions as a character trait rather than a result of external influences. For example, we might judge a coworker's failure to perform well while giving a presentation as the inability to speak well in public. In reality, they didn't get a good night's sleep or have a severe personal issue impacting them. If you're able to take a moment to remind yourself about this, you may open up a feedback session differently—allowing for a better conversation and relationship with your colleague. One study showed that participants who practiced a mindfulness exercise were less likely to suffer from correspondence bias.

Negativity Bias contributes to stress felt during interactions with those of another social group. We tend to be more attentive to this bias and react stronger to adverse events than to positive ones. For example, research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology shows that interacting with people from different social groups stresses us out, partly due to our fear of rejection. Studies have shown that mindful subjects feared rejection less,

Self-Positivity Bias is putting others down to make ourselves feel better. For example, we tend to believe if our boss is critical of a group project's results, their criticism is directed at other group members more so than at ourselves. Remembering this during a mindful moment may help you approach the team more positively or take more ownership of the project's unresolved issues. Research has asserted that mindfulness helps to foster a strong sense of self while simultaneously increasing empathy, even in a subject group with low self-esteem—still, others and caring for those in different social situations.

Mindfulness can help you with awareness of the biases—but you ultimately choose what to do with that understanding.

How to overcome unconscious bias

Although the effectiveness of these types of training varies, there are some steps you can begin implementing to help eliminate your own unconscious biases.

1. Acknowledge your unconscious biases

Awareness is critical when it comes to addressing your own unconscious biases. You're already taking the first necessary steps to understand by reading up on it, but now you can take it further.

1. ??Interact with other people

For many, it's easy to become exclusive, especially in the workplace:

• You have a group of five coworkers you eat lunch with every day.
• You always sit next to that one person in meetings.
• You grab drinks after work with the same two team members.

Chances are, those people you've gravitated towar,?probably look a lot like you, are similar in age to you, and have similar experiences.

It's important to acknowledge these habits — unconscious biases — and challenge yourself to sit next to someone new in meetings or invite a different group to lunch. These small actions can help break some of your unconscious biases.

1. Make data-driven decisions

Making decisions based on data is essential if you're on a hiring team or have a managerial position. One candidate is your age and has a similar background, so you might be inclined to hire her, but the other candidate has five more years of valuable experience.

That's why companies and teams must have some objective system in place when hiring, promoting, and compensating employees. Approaching these decisions with data and a standard set of guidelines can help reduce the effects of unconscious biases.

1. Hire diverse employees

One of the best ways to overcome your unconscious biases is to hire and work with people who don't look like you and don't share the same experiences as you. This will help you gain different perspectives, make fair decisions, and ultimately become a stronger team and company.

CONCLUSION:

Understanding what's happening underneath the surface, for ourselves and others, is the first step in overcoming bias. It's also fundamental to mindful practice.

Before reacting to a situation, we can ask ourselves if we rely on preconceived notions. Building our self-awareness and being on the lookout for biases will make us less likely to react from a place of instinct and stress. Perhaps this is why it is no surprise that people who practice mindfulness "activate" their associations less often than those who do not.