Carten Inc. is a company which is well regarded for its equitable hiring and employment policies. Employees are also known to be appreciative of the work environment. A senior executive, John, who is an ardent supporter of equal pay in workplaces, is about to lead an important policy meeting on a Monday morning. Wanting to make sure that the team is energetic and ready, he intuitively reaches out to Jules, a well performing junior administrator, asking her to ensure that there is a caffeinated beverage ready for every member attending the meeting. She also happens to be the only woman attending the meeting. Jules had had a largely positive experience working at Carten Inc., but was taken aback by this incident. As an administrator, she knows that she is greatly overqualified for the task. John failed to reach out to his personal secretary to make this simple request, and instead assigned it to a female executive, without thinking about it twice.
This incident is a tool to highlight that a harmless action or directive is often a result of unconscious biases, which can have a negative impact on others. Here, John is a boss who is liked by all employees alike and is not prone to acting with prejudice, yet he still makes a glaring error. Much like him, we are infrequently likely to act with bias, due to the imperfection of our cognitive thinking. Most of us believe in positive social change in one sector or the other, but it is also equally likely that we, as products of social influences, have acted with some bias against other people.
These biases are not something you act upon deliberately, to hurt people. Knowing this, the questions arise: What exactly are these biases? When did we cultivate them? The answers lie in the fascinating psychology of unconscious biases.
Understanding Unconscious Biases: The Origin of the Issue
The human mind has two main systems of cognition- the automatic and the deliberate. The job of the automatic system is to make quick, fairly accurate judgements and decisions, whereas the deliberate system works more slowly and thoroughly to ensure precision. In today’s modern, fast-paced, and increasingly complex world, pressures lead us to often rely heavily on the automatic system. The automatic system takes shortcuts, and is thus prone to make many kinds of cognitive errors, called biases.
Unconscious or implicit bias are those that we are largely unaware of and therefore remain out of our direct control. They lead to intuitive, but highly error-prone judgements about people and situations.
Unconscious bias is the result of cognitive reasoning that was embedded in our brain long before we even realized it. It often originates at an early age and is based on our own background, culture, and personal experiences1. Our brain tries to make sense of the world and everything in it by trying to look for patterns and associations. In doing so, it tries to group all information into fixed categories with defined characteristics. When this is done with social groups, stereotypes result. Stereotyping forms the central aspect of prejudice and discrimination and are detrimental to equitable treatment of minority groups.
Multiplicity of Unconscious Biases
There is a wide scope for making generalizations or errors when it comes to our own quick-thinking. There are over 15 unconscious biases we may act upon such as ageism, gender, attribution and conformity bias and the common Halo-Horns effect, among others. One of the most prominent manifestations of unconscious bias is the affinity bias, which refers to our tendency to prefer people that we perceive as similar to us, in workspaces and otherwise. The grounds for similarity can be – religion, caste, hometown, educational background, etc. While we seek out the company of these ‘similar people’, this can be alienating for other employees who feel less welcomed.
Other manifestations include the halo effect, where we value one positive quality of a person so much that we allow it to overshadow any negative qualities they have. Other employees may be demotivated due to workplace favoritism that results due to the halo effect. The other side of this coin is the horns effect, where we notice one negative aspect of a person and then form an overall negative view of them. In future, we then fail to appreciate any good initiatives that such employees take.
Impact – Biases and Exclusion in the Workplace
There is a misguided belief that a team of similar individuals works better together due to shared interests and experiences. However, there is ample evidence that teams where individuals from diverse backgrounds work together to achieve a common goal yields great results. Harvard Business Review reported that diverse teams solve problems faster than teams which are composed on the basis of similarities2.
People who are on the receiving end of biased treatment are likely to have a poor and uncomfortable work experience. Unconscious biases result in:
- Poor interpersonal relationships between members in the workplace, characterized by exclusive groups of people who interact with each other and exclude others from conversations and team building processes
- Poor organizational diversity with less people being able to achieve leadership roles if they belong to minority groups or culturally different backgrounds
- Lower productivity and unwillingness to take initiative in those who feel like they’re consistently treated biasedly
- Self-censoring in people who feel like they’re treated unfairly. Self censoring refers to a hesitancy to ask relevant questions and doubts that are necessary in a work environment
Apart from these negative factors in the workplace, the very fact that skilled and qualified individuals are made to feel like they do not belong in a space that they worked hard to get to, is a threat to organizational diversity and equity. Overall, unconscious biases contribute to erasure of rich cultural diversity in corporate spaces as people feel treated unfairly due to factors such as their education, place of birth, sex, religion and others.
Doing Better – The Value of Training and Awareness
Unconscious bias can exist at multiple levels: between peers at the same level in the organizational hierarchy and between managers and employees. This makes its damaging impact widespread in a workplace and highlights the need for sensitivity training for all. Awareness, often facilitated by workplace training programmes, is not promoted to shame people into believing that they are malicious. It simply allows people to recognize problem areas in their behaviour to show that one has a potential to do better and create better corporate spaces. Neutral spaces like training sessions allow people to hear each other out and address issues that affect their work.
OneBarrow believes that workspaces that integrate personnel training that can help people unlearn biases, are spaces where most employees feel comfortable to share their ideas, experiences and insights. This belief is one that has shaped the OneBarrow Leadership Training Program, which seeks to equip professionals with the right skills and ideas to deter stereotyping and bias in the workplace and instead use cultural diversity as a valuable tool.
The first step towards corrective action is always acknowledging the problem in a healthy and safe space. We must recognize that a productive workspace is only possible when there is mutual respect among colleagues.
— Riya Shankar Sharma
Content Writer, OneBarrow
— Tanishi Sen
Research Assistant, OneBarrow
References
- Cuellar, N. G. (2017). Unconscious bias: What is yours? Journal of Transcultural Nursing, 28(4), 333–333. https://doi.org/10.1177/1043659617713566
- Rock, D., & Grant, H. (2016, November 4). Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter
