HOW BIASED ARE YOU?
How prejudice can prevent betterment
Our own hidden assumptions could be our biggest impediment to growing, learning and building a kinder world, says Poorna Bell
Think about your circle of close friends. Naturally, you’re pretty like-minded – that’s why you chose them. But what other similarities do you share? How many are the same age, race, class and sexual orientation as you? Or here’s an interesting way to look at it – how many of them are different to you? It was only when I did this mental exercise that I realised a lot of my friends are similar, especially those from a particular racial group, class and gender. For instance, you couldn’t swing a cat in a room full of my friends without hitting several South Asian women in their 30s and 40s. And there’s a chance that while friends may differ from you in one area, they’re generally similar.
This is down to confirmation bias (being attracted to people because they feel familiar), which is one type of unconscious bias. It might make sense to socialise with those who are ‘just like you’, and feeling like you ‘belong’ can seem comforting, but at times, unconscious bias can do us and others a disservice. Whether that’s finding ourselves in the same cultural bubble, where everyone thinks the same without having their views challenged; or more starkly, experiencing the long arm of unconscious bias in the workplace, where people lose out on jobs because of a bias against our gender, religion or race.
How do we know we’re doing it?
We pretty much all are. Unconscious bias can be an unwieldy concept. So in an attempt to explain it without recrimination, Dr Pragya Agarwal has written the stunningly detailed book Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias. ‘Unconscious bias is a bias or prejudice that we often don’t realise we’re carrying,’ says Dr Agarwal. ‘For instance, I might react to certain situations in a particular way because I don’t like something, but I don’t explicitly know I do that. I may not like people who are chatty, but I don’t explicitly realise this. So I might react to a person who is talking a lot just because they are doing that, and I have formed a notion of what they are supposed to be like, and I carry that stereotypical view of a person without explicitly saying this is what I like or dislike.’
We all have a mental shorthand to figure out who is similar to us. Our brains create this so we can quickly make assessments. It’s linked back to a time when survival hinged on our ability to judge whether something was a threat. In the modern world, however, these shortcuts can be connected to a mental bedrock formed of unconscious bias.
But Dr Agarwal explains that bias is not always negative. ‘A parent’s bias that their child is the cleverest and most beautiful is an evolutionary response, designed to trigger parental love and care,’ she writes. ‘This can extend to close friends and family, too. In such cases, mostly there is no negative bias “against” any group.’ However, she adds, ‘If this positive bias creates a negative discrimination against someone else, or it gives an advantage to the favoured group, then it becomes problematic.’
A bias I didn’t realise I was carrying was hindsight bias, where you base future decisions and interactions on things that have happened in the past. In my 20s, for instance, I predominantly dated South Asian men, which wasn’t a conscious preference, but what was available through my friendship circles, and deep down I must have thought it would be better to marry within my own race for a good chance of
success. It wasn’t a great decade of dating for me, and when I found myself single again, I’d refuse to match with South Asian men on dating apps, believing them to be possessive and overbearing. After talking to Dr Agarwal, I realised I was writing off individuals as a homogeneous group, which was not only unfair, but also meant I was limiting my options. Rather than draw my own assumptions based on that person’s appearance or the area they lived in, I became more considered about who I was matching with, and it changed the experience.
Why do we do it?
There are three theories around why the brain forms unconscious bias: the first is that it looks for shortcuts to ease the load on the trillions of mental actions that take place at any given moment. These shortcuts can lead to the creation of stereotypes, such as assuming all Asians are good at maths or women can’t be as knowledgeable as men in certain roles. The second is based on ‘better to be safe than sorry’. This is how we assess a potential threat and act in an overly cautious way, such as someone pulling their handbag closer to them or crossing the street to avoid you because of the colour of your skin (this has happened to me, and it cuts deep). The third is that bias is formed from the gap between the fight or flight responses we used to have when we were more primitive and the reality of our current existence, which is more sophisticated, safer and technologically advanced.
In between the science and studies in her book, Dr Agarwal also shares her own story. ‘I came over as a person of colour from India to the UK as a young, single parent. I was predominantly navigating very white spaces in academia, and even in India, as a girl, women were not supposed to be the predominant sex.’ On her first day at university in India, as one of seven women in a group of 60 men, a fellow student came up to her and joked: ‘Why are you here?’ The implication being that women didn’t study science. In the UK, she has experienced it all, from people saying to her, ‘You’re not very foreign,’ to the bias she experienced when her child had sepsis and medical professionals wouldn’t take her seriously. In that, she cites two biases: one around gender, because mothers are viewed as prone to hysteria; and another as a person of colour, because people from ethnic minorities are less likely to be diagnosed correctly.
Can we retrain our brains?
The short answer is yes, says Dr Agarwal. Her book explains that unconscious bias isn’t a moral issue, so it can be unlearned. It’s important to recognise because there isn’t one person among us who doesn’t get defensive when asked to confront their own bias. A good starting point is to begin recognising your bias. That might be noticing the language you use to describe boys and girls and what they are good at, and that even extends to people from certain countries, such as thinking Germans are great at organisation or Americans are loud. If you’re worried about bias in recruitment, ask HR to conceal the gender and name of candidates to see if it makes a difference. The biggest thing, Dr Agarwal says, is recognising that unconscious bias towards race, gender, sexual orientation or someone’s accent is almost always framed as a joke, which we then laugh along with. But laughing at the bias not only supports it but also reinforces that objecting to it shouldn’t be taken seriously.
‘Our knowledge of how our evolutionary psychology motivated us to behave does not align with our desires today,’ writes Dr Agarwal. If our desires are to be happy, content, feel safe and to live in a world that is more understanding and kind, then addressing a lot of the things we needlessly hold fear and judgement around, is a good place to start.