Bias

Our brains are naturally hardwired to take shortcuts. This is alright; it allows us to make decisions when we lack information or have low mental energy. Despite common belief, bias is not a result of our brains being stupid or lazy. Quite the opposite! Our brains have evolved to become incredibly efficient, saving time and energy so we can act quickly, even if this means our decisions are not always perfectly rational.

Sometimes, we all make poor judgements. When was the last time you regretted a decision because you acted impulsively or overlooked certain information? Knowingly or unknowingly, we occasionally behave in ways that defy logic or reason, and this is thanks to the brain’s tendency to optimize how we process information. Cognitive shortcuts allow our brains to make sense of the world quickly and efficiently. By sticking to patterns—both learned and innate—our brains can cut corners when processing new information. However, the tradeoff is that this can result in biased thinking and decision-making.

Bias can take many forms. You might be most familiar with bias in the context of prejudice or discrimination against certain groups of people based on race, gender, or socioeconomic status. However, you can also be biased toward a certain idea or option. For example, confirmation bias can cause us to favor information that fits with our existing beliefs. This mental shortcut can lead you to overlook information that contradicts your preconceptions, like ignoring scientific research that disproves a health remedy you believe in.

While certain cognitive biases can help us make decisions more efficiently, it often hurts our ability to make decisions that are fair, rational, and favorable—for ourselves and everyone around us. The important thing to remember here is that humans will always hold bias. Since we can’t really change how our brains work, learning to recognize bias in its various forms can help us become more aware of it and take steps to reduce negative consequences.

Implicit Bias: Unconscious feelings or attitudes that shape our judgments and influence our behaviors towards others, often in subtle and unintentional ways.¹ Because these biases are unconscious, they can influence our behavior without our awareness. Sometimes, this makes us act against our conscious beliefs or intentions.

Explicit Bias: Conscious attitudes or beliefs we hold about people or groups.¹ Unlike implicit biases, these biases are intentional (we are fully aware of them). These biases can be positive or negative, but most often show up as discriminatory actions or comments.

Cognitive Biases: Thought patterns or cognitive processes that deviate from logic or rationality. These mental shortcuts, or heuristics, help us process information quickly but often lead us astray by distorting our perception of reality and clouding our judgment. There are over 180 individual cognitive biases that affect how we think and behave. You can learn about many of these biases (and how to avoid them) in our extensive resource library.

Bias is rooted in natural patterns of thinking—our brains gravitate toward these mental shortcuts automatically—so it makes sense that people have been discussing and documenting bias for hundreds of years. 

The general concept of bias can be traced back to ancient philosophy. Plato, one of the most influential thinkers in Greek philosophy, was adamant that our perception of reality is often inaccurate and that our subjective understanding of the world is influenced by common beliefs or popular opinion.

Interestingly, our very understanding of history is shaped by bias. Biases in early historical writings and teachings often favored Western narratives, despite attempts by certain historians to remove bias from historical recounts.² Voltaire, a prominent thinker during the Age of Enlightenment, was one of the first to try to make history an empirical and objective discipline, but his ideas were not popular at the time.

Through the 18th and 19th centuries that followed, Eurocentrism continued to prevail, with a strong bias against other cultures. To this day, many historical narratives exclude certain groups, facts, and perspectives. Biases have existed in academia for as long as humans have been pursuing research and education. 

Bias became a popular topic to study after the emergence of the social sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries. This period marks a time when psychologists, economists, marketing professionals, and several other disciplines began focusing on human behavior and exploring how biases shape our beliefs and actions.

Two psychologists in particular, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, introduced the idea of cognitive biases in the 1970s, noting that people fall victim to several different types of biases when attempting to make judgments under uncertainty.³ Tversky and Kahneman explained that our minds default to biases to simplify processing. In short, our brains rely on a kind of estimation process based on a process of pattern recognition and memory retrieval, and this helps us predict what’s going to happen or how a certain decision might play out.

During this period, psychologists also began exploring how bias leads to stereotyping, prejudice, and conformity. Unsurprisingly, researchers in the field were very interested in the cognitive and social factors that perpetuate bias. This led to the development of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a tool intended to measure how strongly people associate different concepts with stereotypes and reveal unconscious attitudes or preferences towards certain groups or ideas.⁴

While the IAT is the subject of significant debate regarding its accuracy and validity, it’s widely used in psychology research and even implicit bias training.⁵ After all, there is a correlation between how people perform on IATs and how they behave toward certain groups.⁴ You can take a version of this test at Project Implicit if you want to see what it’s all about.

Bias Awareness

Bias is now widely studied in countless fields, including psychology, economics, and even technology. In recent years, bias has become a hot topic outside academia, as the influence of social media and the spread of disinformation has heightened concerns about bias in news and media sources. This growing public awareness is a good thing—understanding how our brains jump to conclusions can help us become more aware of our automatic thoughts and how these might impact ourselves and others.⁶ 

For example, the similar-to-me-effect is a cognitive bias that causes us to prefer people who look and think like us. By being aware of this affinity, we can acknowledge and actively work to counteract it, ultimately creating more inclusive spaces for people who are different from us.⁴

A Double-Edged Sword

The crux of the problem is that bias has the potential to harm people. Bias is especially dangerous when people in positions of power act on their biases, whether they’re aware of it or not. You can see examples of this everywhere, from biased hiring and promotional practices in the workplace to discriminatory policing and sentencing in the criminal justice system.

However, bias is not always negative. Cognitive biases are often leveraged in marketing to influence consumer behavior, which can have a positive impact on business and can even benefit the consumer (when these techniques are used ethically). For example, if a business leverages the authority bias by partnering with trusted healthcare professionals to endorse their wellness products, this can provide consumers with the reassurance they need to trust a new product. Of course, businesses have to be careful to avoid manipulating people’s biases to deceive or mislead them.

AI Bias

One of the more recent consequences is the perpetuation of our human biases in artificial intelligence (AI) systems. This occurs when AI training data contains societal biases, such as racial or gender stereotypes, which can result in biased algorithms that generate unfair outcomes. We’ve already seen instances where AI decision-making discriminates against certain groups. For example, in 2015, researchers found that Google’s AdFisher tool showed far fewer ads for high-paying jobs to women than to men.⁷

As we begin offloading more of our decisions to AI systems, finding ways to mitigate AI bias will be crucial. It will require a collaborative effort from various disciplines to understand how bias shows up in AI training data and implement methods for tackling bias in various stages of AI decision-making.

We Cannot Be That Dumb

Is this a pessimistic view of our ability to make judgments? This is one of the most common critiques about cognitive biases. Professionals in the field of psychology Thomas Gilovich and Dale Griffin call this the “we cannot be that dumb” critique, stating that we can’t be so flawed in our reasoning that we are constantly making irrational decisions.³ 

These critics dislike the notion that all human reasoning is somehow prone to error, pointing out that discussions of bias too often focus on the negative consequences. After all, if bias was always maladaptive, it would be very difficult for us to manage our lives. 

In truth, bias can also be adaptive. For example, a bias in favor of advice from medical professionals over non-medical sources can help us make better decisions about our health. Biases also help us make quick decisions, which can serve us well when we need to act fast in a dangerous situation.⁶

Nature vs. Nurture

There is also great debate over whether bias is mostly learned or innate. Some researchers argue that certain cognitive biases are rooted in evolutionary adaptations while others believe they are primarily learned through our experiences.³ Advocates for the evolutionary psychology perspective argue that we evolved biases to help us solve problems and make judgments that were important for our survival and that we retain many of these biases today, even if we’re facing vastly different problems now.

While some biases might have an evolutionary origin, there is also evidence that we develop biases through our life experiences. Recognizing patterns helps us navigate the world, solve problems, and interact with other people.⁸ For example, we recognize that someone wearing a ring on their ring finger is married based on our experiences with this pattern. We also learn about patterns from others, including our family, peers, and educators. Unfortunately, we often try to make judgments based on these learned patterns even when there’s a gap in our knowledge, and this is when we exhibit bias.

Ultimately, bias likely results from a combination of both hardwired cognitive processes and learned experiences. Regardless, we must recognize our tendency to take mental shortcuts and follow thought patterns so we can be aware of our biases and remain open-minded to new information.

Biases

This article looks more closely at the cognitive mechanisms behind biases, exploring how our brains are prone to shortcuts and fallacies that diminish our ability to make rational decisions.

How Implicit Biases Complicate Female Mentorship

Implicit gender bias can have a serious impact on women’s careers. However, men aren’t the only ones who can hold biases against women — women are also prone to making biased assumptions about other women. This article explores this concept and how it affects female mentorship.

1. Vela, M. B., Erondu, A. I., Smith, N. A., Peek, M. E., Woodruff, J. N., & Chin, M. H. (2022). Eliminating Explicit and Implicit Biases in Health Care: Evidence and Research Needs. Annual review of public health, 43, 477-501. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-052620-103528
2. Historical Bias | World Civilization. (n.d.). Lumen Learning. Retrieved June 7, 2024, from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-worldcivilization/chapter/historical-bias/
3. Bottom, W., Gilovich, T., Griffin, D., & Kahneman, D. (2004). Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment. The Academy of Management Review. 29(4):695. Doi: 10.2307/20159081
4. Miyatsu, R. (2019, April 25). Understanding your biases | Psychological & Brain Sciences. Psychological & Brain Sciences. Retrieved June 7, 2024, from https://psych.wustl.edu/news/understanding-your-biases
5. Goldhill, O. (2017, December 3). Implicit bias trainings are used to fight racism, but IAT science is flawed. Quartz. Retrieved June 7, 2024, from https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psychological-test-to-fight-racism
6. Grawitch, M. (2020, September 10). Biases Are Neither All Good Nor All Bad. Psychology Today. Retrieved June 7, 2024, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/hovercraft-full-eels/202009/biases-are-neither-all-good-nor-all-bad
7. Ntoutsi E, Fafalios P, Gadiraju U, et al. (2020) Bias in data-driven artificial intelligence systems—An introductory survey. WIREs Data Mining Knowl Discov, 10(3). https://doi.org/10.1002/widm.1356 
8. Emberton M. (2021). Unconscious Bias Is a Human Condition. The Permanente Journal, 25, 20.199. https://doi.org/10.7812/TPP/20.199