Understanding unconscious bias | The Royal Society
The unconscious mind is amazing: it has vastly more information than our conscious mind by using shortcuts, based on our background cultural environment, and personal experiences, to make almost instantaneous decisions about everything around us. The snag: is it wrong? Quite a lot of the time, especially on matters that need rational thinking here.’s a classic example: a bat and a ball cost one pound 10 pence.
If the bat costs one pound more than the ball, how much does the ball cost most people, including over 50 students at some of the world’s leading universities, get the answer wrong and say 10 pence?
The answer is 5 pence.
Many of us choose 10 pence without thinking.
This is because our unconscious mind uses instinct, not analysis, so our unconscious is fallible, it’s also biased.
It makes snap judgments of people we meet, categorizing them according to gender, social and other characteristics.
In milliseconds we judge whether somebody is like us and belongs to our group.
These are the people we favor, so men might favor men, while women might favor women.
However, we can belong to different groups, and we like to be part of an in-group that’s powerful, which could mean a woman favoring, a man over a woman that’s unconscious bias.
All of us have it and it colors our decisions without our realizing it. For example, research reveals that if I were a man, I would be more likely to be nodding in agreement right now, because people pay more attention to a male voice.
The Royal Society fosters excellence in science, but this can only be achieved if we select from the widest range of talent and that’s not possible.
If unconscious bias is narrowing down the field for nonscientific reasons, to lessen the impact of unconscious bias, which is easier for us to notice in others, we are raising awareness of unconscious bias among members of our selection and appointment panels.
We’re encouraging panel members to deliberately slow down decisions, making reconsider reasons for decisions, question cultural stereotypes, and monitor each other for unconscious bias.
We can’t cure unconscious bias, but with self-awareness, we can address it,
