This week and next week I will take a deep dive into the world of bias.
Bias is an evolutionary brain hack that is innate to us and serves a purpose, but can also (and most certainly does) lead to negative outcomes (e.g. discrimination).
Today’s post will specifically dissect what bias is and where it comes from.
Unconscious Bias
In talking about bias, I will be specifically referring to unconscious bias because it’s a sneaky thing that some treat like Voldermort—that which should not be named!
Over the course of this and the next post, you’ll see why biases need to be aired out and brought under the microscope. It is my hope that by improving our understanding of bias, we can collectively improve our ability to identify and mitigate our own biases.
But first, what is an unconscious bias?
It’s a judgment made unconsciously about other groups, people, or situations that is based on and seems to confirm our past experience, and it’s something that we believe is true even when it isn’t.
In fact, these are so unconscious that if one we exhibited was pointed out to us we’d most likely deny it.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Judgments are bad, right? So it’s often hard for folks to understand or accept that bias is completely normal. So normal, in fact, that bias is unavoidable—it’s part and parcel of being human and living the human experience.
Our brains are literally built for bias. After all, they are perception-creating, judgment-making machines.
If you have a brain, then you have bias. And it’s critical to note the university and normalcy of bias; it is not limited to “bad” people.
If you think bias is bad and don’t consider yourself a “bad” person then you will not think that unconscious bias applies to you. And if it does not apply to you, then there’s no need to hold yourself accountable for your biases.
If you ever need examples of people not holding themselves accountable to their biases, then just scroll through the social media feed of your choice. Prepare yourself to see it everywhere. Everywhere!
You’re right, we never see that play out on social media. Ever. 
So we must venture willingly into discomfort—embrace it—just to be willing to begin the process of self-reflecting on our biases.
Bias in Action
Before we explore bias further, it’s important to look at some examples of it at play.
Take resumés sent in when applying for jobs. I’ll point out three examples of unconscious bias that have been demonstrated consistently (so in general or on average, not in every instance):
1. Gender. Male applicants are generally preferred to female applicants. Male names are subconsciously viewed more favorably as being better qualified for a job.
2. Race/Ethnicity. Names associated with white people are preferred to those associated with populations of color. For example, resumés with names associated with black or Arab people are deemed less desirable. This can occur to white people with names associated with populations of color. I have an acquaintance in this latter situation who submits a photo with their resumé to combat this unconscious bias.
3. Order. Resumés reviewed first are typically given stronger preference as employer recall is best for the first few reviewed. This most likely relates to our brain’s desire to expend the least amount of energy with decision making.
So these are three common examples of bias all related to job resumés.
A Deeper Dive
I want to explore bias more in-depth looking at some of the amazing science underlying it. Again, the aim here is to break down the stigma surrounding bias.
Biases arise when brains form thoughts. We cannot know what our very next thought will be. We only know our current thought.
Why? Because our thoughts are formed in our unconscious brain mere milliseconds prior to being passed to our conscious brain.
Said differently: our unconscious brain is in control of our conscious thoughts.
This process happens so fast and automatically because our brains receive over 10 million data inputs every second! That’s a staggering number to fathom!
Of that onslaught of data inputs, we can only be conscious of 40 (literally, a rounding error) at any given moment. The rest of them get shunted away and stored in our unconscious brain as experiential data.
And it is this data that we are unaware we’re even taking in that forms our conscious thoughts!
Now you’re starting to see why bias is so damn tricky!
Active Vs. Passive
Those who know me may think this header refers to mutual fund management or real estate investing, but here it refers to the experiential data our brains store.
What’s evident from the points mentioned above is that our unconscious brain generates our thoughts using stored data from past experiences.
We can divide these past experiences into two flavors—you guessed it—active and passive.
Active experiences are those we’ve actually experienced including the people we’ve met, places we’ve been, conversations we’ve had, etc.
Passive experiences are everything we’ve seen or been told including things in stories, books, and the news as well as on TV, etc.
Oh Wait... Oh No
All of this experiential data, both active and passive, is all mixed together and stored in our unconscious brain and treated as equivalent. Our brains are not good at telling one apart from the other.
Yes, that’s right, that supercomputer sitting between your ears is not equipped to discern between your actual experience and something you heard on the news.
Should have paid for the upgraded supercomputer!
You may be thinking that I’m off my rocker because it’s frankly upsetting to think we’d conflate active and passive experiences.
But pause for one second and look at the world around you. I can only speak to the US (apologies to my, like, six international readers) but doesn’t this explain the current political schism and now how misinformation has such a strong grip on people?
Brains can use passive experiences, formed from say, a news source, spouting inaccurate data to generate thoughts that are biased but believed to be true.
Cue the two (main) competing narratives for life in the US as we know it currently.
Why Are Biases Useful?
At this point, you may be wondering, “Why the hell did our brains evolve to function this way!?” Why is bias normal?
Well, evolutionarily, speed was more useful than accuracy in assessing stimuli. We needed a way to take in the flood of data and organize it in a useful way to help us survive. This is challenging when we have a limited capability to actively focus on inputs (i.e., 40 out of >10,000,000).
So our brains evolved to try to store everything but only present us the salient features that would best help us further along the species.
Environmental pressures selected for sacrificing the fidelity in our data processing for pure speed (in a way, akin to giving up specificity for sensitivity).
It was more useful to us to mistake a tabby cat for a tiger and flee to safety than take an additional second (or whatever) to confirm that it’s not a tiger (at which point if it was, it’d be game over).
This is why mimicry in the animal world can be so powerful. If assessments are made so quickly, then all it might take to scare off a predator, for example, is a passing resemblance to a poisonous animal it wants to avoid. If said predator were to take the time to scrutinize the imposter, it may in fact discern it as such, and enjoy a meal.
So biases help us make sense of the world expediently and have historically served the species well. But just like fear, in our modern society, they have proven themselves maladaptive at times given how successful we’ve been at controlling our environment.
Biases are like Ions
I left out one important feature in the definition I gave at the beginning of this post.
And that is: unconscious judgment can be positive or negative. (That is where the similarities to ions end—I may have oversold this header, sorry).
We tend to think of the impact of bias as the bias itself, and the impact is often negative—e.g., discrimination. However, the bias itself can be a positive judgment about a dominant group (or group similar to us) and not a negative judgment about a marginalized group.
A positive bias can be just as harmful as a negative one.
Take for example a healthcare organization where the leadership consists of only Ivy League grads who only promote other Ivy League grads to leadership positions.
In this case, leadership has a positive bias towards those similar to themselves. However, this has the same effect as a negative bias towards non-Ivy League employees: not promoting the non-Ivy Leaguers to leadership positions.
This serves to entrench the Ivy Leaguers in power where they can maintain exclusive control over leadership and shut out anyone not similar to them.
The outcome from a positive bias can be the same as a negative bias because the two are often the inverse of one another; they are essentially two sides of the same coin.
All This Bias(ed) Writing is Exhausting!
Today we covered what bias is, why we are biased creatures and how it serves us, and some features of bias. We will expand upon this exploration of bias next week.
In the meantime, I want you to consider some of your beliefs about other groups, people, and situations and what may be factoring into those beliefs (hint: your biases).
Next week I’ll describe categories of bias, how and where bias shows up in medicine, more illuminating examples of bias in action, and how to limit the deleterious effect of bias.
Any big takeaways from today’s post on bias? Let me know in the comments below.
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