Are you Conscious of your Unconscious Bias?

Here’s an old riddle. If you haven’t heard it, give yourself time to answer before reading ahead: a father and son are in a horrible car crash that kills the dad. The son is rushed to the hospital; just as he’s about to go under the knife, the surgeon says, “I can’t operate—that boy is my son!” Can you think who the surgeon was?

Many thought if the boy had two fathers or maybe a ghost, and so on. It never occurred to many that the surgeon might be his mother. These are the automatic, unintentional stereotypes that influence our behaviours.

What are these different type of lenses which we use to see people around us to include them or push them away?

Naturally gravitating towards people those are like us is called Affinity Bias. for eg: looks like you, same college, same town, interests. Due to this, we may put the wrong person in a reject list or the opposite. This may lead to poor decision making and lacking diversity. And many more biases like beauty bias, conformity and contrast bias, gender bias, halo or horns bias as so on.

It also affects parenting in the way parents treat their sons vs their daughters eg: boys will be boys and girls will be girls. The list goes on and on for the children from what education they get, how they dress, whom they make friends with. The lense which the parent sees trickles down to the lense which the child starts to see through and sometimes these lenses are not always right.

Combating unconscious bias has to be a continual process and it gives rise to innovation and creativity. Everyone should be treated fairly. For organisations and team, this approach will help in retaining and attracting talented people. Also positively affects in the way on how clients are treated by employees. Studies have proved that a diverse workforce improves your revenue.

Testing yourself for biases through the IAT test - implicit association test developed by Harward business school will make you self-aware about your biases. Being self-aware while communicating with anyone and conscious about the kind of words you use.

Another way of combating bias-ness is having empathy. Empathy is all about connecting with people on an emotional level. We can exercise being Empathetic by practising a 4 stage process.

• Identifying the emotion
• Recalling the experience and thinking about your feeling in the particular emotion
• The remedy is the help you got to get through the emotion
• Apply the same solution in your behaviour to others

Organisations should be aware of these biases while writing the processes, policies, procedures and recruiting.

In the current Coronavirus situation, we should be more cognizant of our biases towards others and be empathetic.

Happy Recruiting!Happy Learning!