Like It Or Not, You're Biased.

Erin Beamer is a Leadership Ascent Coach/Facilitator and an Executive Leadership Coach for CCL. Since 1997, through her business, Autumn Consulting, she provides executive coaching, facilitation, & consulting services.

Like It or Not, You’re Biased.

Everybody is biased. Or as Howard J. Ross, best-selling author of Everyday Bias, says, if you’re human, you’re biased. And the exponentially growing body of neuroscience research is illuminating how the brain hardwires what we learn, including biases. Beginning in childhood, as we are increasingly exposed to ideas, behavior, and attitudes, associated wirings in our brains expand and allow our responses to become automatic or unconscious.

Consider a child learning to tie a shoe. The more the child ties shoes, the easier it gets. And most adults, who live where tied shoes are the norm, no longer have to think about each motion involved in shoe-tying. We barely need to think about it because the hardwiring for shoe-tying responds quickly. When we want to tie our shoe, all the associated synapses[1] simply fire messages through our body and fingers, and voila, the shoe is tied. I no longer remember learning to tie my shoe, I simply know how. Thank you my dear brain for your efficiency.

Bias Creation and Triggering

When we live in an environment, we pick up messages all around us. About women and men. About races, religions, money, eating, what’s valuable, beauty, success, education, what the rules are, who has power, options, what’s important, what we deserve, how to interact with others, how things are done, etc. As these messages are repeated, they create neural networks in our brain; they get ingrained deeper and deeper into how we think—and how we think automatically. Here’s a simple, potent example: A man I know said he would not date someone who didn’t put the toilet paper roll on the right way. Which is the right way—with the paper hanging in front or behind the roll?

There is no better way, but you likely have a preference. For something as small as the direction of a toilet paper roll, people can get angry. What’s going on literally is our brains have hardwired to pull paper off the roll a certain way. So when the roll is the other way, the automatic (brain synapse firing) flip of the wrist doesn’t work properly. And because we can become so accustomed to not having to think consciously about this action—this way of doing something—it can be surprisingly frustrating or annoying when our hard-wired action does not get our expected result—when it gets an excess of paper flowing off the roll instead. When there is a challenge to our unconscious bias about how things should be, it can easily trigger a negative response.

If we can get upset by our bias in how toilet paper hangs, imagine what happens when we have dense synapse wiring related to our behavior and beliefs about gender, religion, how to treat others, driving, right and wrong, human rights, how to spend money, expectations of privilege, exclusionary practices, what marriage should be, family, which children on the planet deserve to eat, what’s fair in a capitalist economy, how people dress or use body art, the value of busyness, or whether it’s ok to be late, etc.

Ross provides a useful definition of BIAS: “a particular tendency or inclination, especially one that prevents unprejudiced consideration of a question.” Remember unprejudiced means not having or showing a dislike or distrust based on fixed or preconceived ideas.

In contrast to the unprejudiced, much of our bias comes from ideas, behavior, attitudes that have been hard-wired, i.e., fixed for a long time; we absorbed them from our environment and experiences. We learned many of them unconsciously. Experts believe that 90-95% of our beliefs are ingrained by the time we are 18. And those beliefs mostly stay with us, unless we consciously look at them and choose to ingrain something different.

Away from Defensively Biased

One of the benefits of Ross’ core premise, if you’re human, you’re biased, is that it can open us up to looking at our own biases—rather than remaining in that defensive response, “I am not biased;” or the also not-so-helpful response of looking for justification for our inclinations. There is much research showing that when a bias is challenged, we tend to both look for confirmation of our bias and dismiss information that challenges our bias. One article that uses this research is Pygmalion in Management, (Harvard Business Review; J. Sterling Livingston; January 2003).[2] It explains how negative biases towards others have a negative impact on others’ performance. And their lowered performance in turn reinforces the initial bias.

When we, instead, look open-mindedly for our biases, and to where in our life experience they sprang, we can then be intentional about how we choose to believe and act now.

Discovery of our biases matters in at least three ways:

1. The opportunity to consciously re-wire our brains to act in alignment with adult-chosen beliefs.

For example, valuing styles or approaches of others in a more expansive way; or changing our behavior because, as famous executive coach Marshal Goldsmith says, what got you here won’t get you there.

2. Actively reducing the impact of discriminatory biases towards others.

For example, sexual misconduct, gender or racial stereotyping, other erroneous assumptions about people different than ourselves, blatant discrimination such as sizeism, or a presumption of privilege.[3]

3. Ensuring the best judgments and decisions are made for our lives and our organizations.

For example, who gets hired; whose ideas are heard; to whom do we presume to give scut-work; who gets positive visibility assignments and mentoring; whom do we presume needs our protection versus opportunity to make their own choices; going for the known versus unknown risk; choosing what we recognize versus what’s uncomfortable; or focusing on now versus longer term results.

In its effort to be efficient, our brains also use pattern recognition to filter what comes into our conscious awareness. This too can blind us to some information to the point of seriously distorted assessments, while providing the illusion that our decisions are well formed. There is significant literature available about more than a dozen of these; and awareness of these universal filtering patterns can help us intentionally counter-balance them in our decision making.

Challenging Our Bias

As decades-long expert in bias awareness, Maurice Brown (Maurice Brown & Associates, LLC), states, the biggest challenges to unconscious bias are 1) self-awareness—we don’t know what we don’t know, and 2) that the brain resists change to what it believes. The research is really clear: If we have a bias or filter, we look for data that supports that bias, and we discount data that refutes the bias. The negative impact to self or others or the world can be huge—in pain, damage, war, or diminished possibilities, results, and relationships. Fortunately we can choose to overcome this resistance in our brains via expanded self-awareness. We all have neuroplasticity—the brain’s capacity to learn, or learn something different—even something different than that which has been previously hardwired. As adults, this usually happens through choice, by actively choosing to become aware of and change our bias.

By expanding your own bias awareness, where might you expand possibilities, get richer results, use conflict creatively, or bring deeper wisdom into your contributions? What would it take to open, or further open, this door in your mind?

© Erin Beamer, 2017

[1] Synapse: Junction between two nerve cells, consisting of a minute gap across which impulses pass by diffusion of a neurotransmitter. Synapses exist in a biological neural network, a series of interconnected neurons whose activation defines a recognizable linear pathway.

[2] Pygmalion is a mythological character who fell in love with his own creation. Pygmalion Effects refers to when expectations of others’ performance become self-fulfilling prophecies.

[3] A presumption of privilege arises when a person with power or in the majority group (and as such, having access to resources and benefits that others don’t have), claims both the advantages that those resources provide and that s/he deserves or earned those advantages above those who did not have access to the same resources. And in so doing, that advantaged person devalues the less advantaged person or group; and through that, further creates power imbalance.

#bias #perspective #shifting