How Unconscious Bias Affects Our Actions

Name: Institution: Course Code: Date: Unconscious Bias Our brains make decisions on two levels; consciously and unconsciously. It is impossible to determine the number of decisions a person makes in a particular period of time or even simultaneously. There is a wide range of decisions the brains have to make at any point and those that made unconsciously could be subject to our biases that stem from previous factors and environmental issues. Human subconscious brain has evolved to take shortcuts to make decisions faster and that increases an individual’s chances of arriving at misinformed and ill-informed decisions. The rapid decision-making has a survival benefit to the individual. According to CITATION Lip05 \l 1033 (Lipton), ‘we are conscious of only about 5 percent of our cognitive activity, so most of our decisions, actions, emotions, and behavior depends on the 95 percent of brain activity that goes beyond our conscious awareness.’ Humans are therefore predisposed to unconscious bias and it is impossible to eradicate. According to CITATION Els18 \l 1033 (Elsevier), unconscious bias is the ‘inadvertent generalizations and preconceptions rather than using a set of objective qualitative or quantitative parameters.’ These inadvertent generalizations may not be logical to others and it is based on our own background, culture, and personal experiences and how we have been socialized. We undeniably ‘fall woefully short of our inflated self-perception’ according to CITATION Ban03 \l 1033 (Banaji, Bazerman and Chugh). Our brain is therefore a survival machine and sometimes some of the unconscious decisions we make are subject to prejudice and discriminatory behavior. How unconscious bias affects our actions Our biases affect our decision-making processes in a number of ways. Our perception about people and how we see reality. Secondly, our attitude which is manifested from the way we react towards certain people. Thirdly, our behavior which is evident from the way we are friendly or receptive to certain people. Additionally, our listening skills can be affected by our biases as our prejudices determine how much we listen or pay attention to certain people or even the degree to which we comfort certain people. All these elements are automatic prejudices and they influence our snap decisions but we can identify the situations where these prejudices may spring up, and then exert greater care and restraint in making the pertinent decisions. We must find ways to make our conscious brains take up from our egalitarian brains in areas we have identified unconscious bias to enable us to build positive social relationships. There are different types of subconscious bias and they are discussed here below; Conformity Bias This form of bias stems from our intrinsic feeling of subscribing to group mentality. Most people tend to agree with the majority even when they know they are wrong. Peer pressure drowns their confidence and independence and they opt to join the group and adopt their perspective of opinion rather than being different and voice their opinions. We are all guilty of this bias of leaning to agree with the group thinking and we can address it by training ourselves to be firm in our decisions irrespective of the groups’ take on the issue and or if they present a logical reasoning to their decision. Beauty bias At some point anyone must have judged people by their physical attributes and especially their beauty even when it has nothing to do with the situation at hand. Most job recruiters tend to judge the suitability of a candidate from their physical appearance or rather their beauty or their definition of their looks. It could be the reason why 60% CEOs in the US are over six feet tall whilst only 15% of the population is over 6-feet-tall and only 3% is over 6.2 feet whilst roughly 36% of CEOs are 6.2 feet tall CITATION Aid17 \l 1033 (McCullen). These are results of a systemic unconscious recruitment and career growth prejudices that are prevalent at the workplace. Affinity bias This form of bias stems from people we have a feeling are familiar or share the same background in some way. It could be the same college, same neighborhood, supporters of the same team, reminds us of someone we know or like. Our natural disposition will accord such people significant prevalence in our decision-making process unknowingly. If we do not feel or there is no substantive feeling that that we have a commonality, we may naturally be cold to them or employ other forms of bias such as beauty bi...