Bias and Challenging Our Own Biases

What is a bias?

Every experience we have impacts our outlook and our perspective. Throughout our lives we accumulate an array of biases, which are views and or beliefs in favor of or against something in particular. Biases help form who we are and influence what choices we make and what actions we take. Many biases we accumulate are learned through our experiences, our development as growing humans, and our interactions with our families and our peers.

When most people hear or think of the term bias we immediately lean towards negative bias, inclinations, tendencies, preferences, and prejudices against a person, a culture, a religion or belief, and even ideas and objects. These negative biases are often influenced from learned attitudes, behaviors, and stereotypes rather than accurate knowledge and or personal experience.

While there are many biases that we have that are positive and many that are benign, we are going to be exploring the concept of challenging our biases that are negative and discriminatory towards other people. As examples, a positive bias would be the belief or view that everyone should be treated equitably and fairly, while a negative bias would be the belief or view that some people should be treated differently than others.

What makes a bias negative? 

Generally speaking, what makes a bias negative is how it impacts yourself and those you interact with. More often negative biases tend to be discriminatory and or exclusionary which can lead to actions and behaviors that are harmful to self and to other people. 

Most negative biases are projected towards:

• Race.

• Ethnicity.

• Gender.

• Religion.

• Sexual orientation.

• Socioeconomic background.

• Educational background.

Explicit Bias versus Implicit Bias

There are many different types of biases. each of which can either be Explicit Bias/ Conscious Bias or Implicit Bias/Unconscious Bias

How Bias Impacts People