Where does unconscious bias come from?

All human beings have biases. They are the quick assumptions and judgements we make about people before we know who they are. The types of biases we have will depend on where and when we grew up, our families, education system, books, TV and media, as well as our lived experiences, particularly those from our formative years.

We have both conscious (explicit) biases and unconscious (implicit) biases. A conscious bias might be that you support a particular sports team. You might be consciously aware of other biases too, for example, different makes of car might cause you to conjure up an image of who the driver is and make assumptions about how they will behave on the road.

Many of our biases operate at an unconscious level. That means that we make quick judgements about people, both positive and negative, and we are not even consciously aware that we’re doing it. These are unconscious biases.

We have two operating systems in the brain – the conscious brain that processes things slowly, is evidence-driven and makes complex decisions, and the unconscious brain that is incredibly fast, associative and automatic – the autopilot.

The brain receives approximately 11 million pieces of information per second. The conscious brain can’t handle all of this, so to avoid overwhelm, the unconscious mind categorises every experience we encounter and files it away. When we make decisions, the brain often takes shortcuts and relies on this filing system. These shortcuts are often unreliable, as they are based on past encounters and learned associations, not on evidence.

Our unconscious biases can cause us to show preferential treatment to some people or unfair treatment towards others without even realising we’re doing it.

Unless we consciously slow down decision-making to put the conscious brain back in charge, we run the risk of unwittingly disadvantaging some people without valid reason.

As well as deliberately slowing down decision-making, you can proactively look into exploring and tackling your own unconscious biases. It can be pretty liberating!