Unconscious Bias

Are we unconsciously biased,that is the question. The idea of being unconsciously biased is to say that people are biased without recognizing it. According to the article,Unconscious bias: Some lessons learned,society is most at fault for creating biases like this. They create these invisible barriers that divide the world into "good or bad". These divisions create ideals of denial and resistance. No body wants be considered bad or wants to be accused of falling under the category of being wrong,so to avoid this,we use bias as mental short cuts to make decisions. Biases are our way of trying to explain the cause of an idea while still maintaining the what we want. A good example of this is Attribution Bias. This is defined as a tendency to think when we do well it is down to our own merit. When we do badly we tend to blame external factors. With other people, we tend to do the opposite. This is the most common type of bias,that most humans have and is the most overlooked because most people never recognize it when it happens.The article goes on to talk about many different types of Bias and how each plays a role in helping humans try to compensate with this theoretical idea of being considered good or bad. Biases not only give reassurance for humans quickly they also define the type of person you are. Biases can determine the kind of choices you make as a person as well as how we view ourselves compared to other people. For example,Affinity Bias is tendency to act more favorable to people reminding us of ourselves. This Bias defines people who tend to treat other people better depending on how much they remind them of themselves,From this it could be stated that Biases also shape how treat people and yourself. It determines the kind of sociability you have and how use it.The article then goes on to say this," Unconscious biases limit our ability to reason objectively. While participants should not be shamed in training sessions, they do need to understand the influence of unconscious biases." This quote is saying that while Unconscious Bias is natural,It isn't good to have, and as people we need to learn how to recognize when these biases are taking place. It also says not recognizing these biases lead to consequences such as job hiring. Employers with this kind of Bias can end up turning down or rejecting those who cold be valuable workers because they don't feel they"fit in". They can also interfere with the productivity of an individual or a work team. On the job, employers who execute Affinity Bias will treat those who they like on the work team better than those they don't like as much. This will in result, cause one portion of the team to progress while the other stays the same or digresses. In a turn of events the portion of the team that isn't progressing notices that the other portion of team is progressing will catch on that the employer is biased while the employer himself dose not. This will cause inability for the employee to see the employer as,"credible" and they may lack motivation in doing assigned job knowing it may not matter in the end ,anyway. Multiply this scenario to match the millions of working facilities across the nation where this situation can occur again,it is easy to see how this quickly becomes a problem. This is like McCarthyism because soon people who are looking for jobs will be weary to because they end up generalizing all employers as bias. While this not true,it will discourage those who want to go into a workplace and cause financial depreciation in many societies. While this not a"witch hunt"per say,the other affect of this bias is that people will be quick to judge employers who they feel are bias without any reasoning behind their claim. This makes thus kind of bias will result in just as big of a danger as a "witch hunt". According to the article,the best way to go about this is to let the participants discover this bias on their own. This can be done through discussions and exercises well as developing insights into skills/strategies for mitigating bias They should also have participants practice skills and strategies in different work situations,like at home or out in public,anything that involves transactions among people.