Key Questions

• What is Bias?

• According to research, every second, our brains process 11 million bits of information, but our conscious minds can only deal with around 45 of these data points...

• Conscious v Unconscious Bias

• Conscious bias is when a person is aware they’re choosing one way of working, or one solution or person over another. But are they ready to review or change their choice?

• The Difficulty with the Term Bias

• When we talk about Bias in the workplace, it isn’t only towards people. In fact, we apply bias to many things...

• Problems Overcoming Bias

• Even when we become aware of how biases can affect our decision-making, and lead to unfairness, it can still be difficult to overcome them. Here we examine some of the problems…

Most Common Biases

• Affinity Bias

• Affinity Bias is when we favour people, or ideas that are similar or familiar to us. They think or look like us, or may have had similar experiences…

• Beauty Bias

• Beauty bias is the tendency to favour people we perceive as being more beautiful over those who don’t fit our concept of beauty.  We also tend to favour their ideas or products…

• Confirmation Bias

• When we think we know something, we seek to solidify our thoughts by looking for evidence to prove our point, opinion, or hypothesis. Our brains do this all the time unconsciously...

• Conformity Bias

• Conformity Bias is the name given to the phenomenon where we change our thoughts, preferences and beliefs to align with the people around us…

• The Halo & The Horns

• When someone performs well at something, we automatically increase our perception of that person’s value generally and this is the Halo Effect. Its opposite is the Horns Effect…

• Hindsight Bias

• It’s very common for us to want to show our value or intelligence by retrospectively predicting what’s already happened, and this is known as Hindsight Bias... 

• Negativity & Positivity

• Most of us are prone to Positivity or Negativity Bias and both cause the same level of distortion…

• Opportunity Bias

• Opportunity Bias causes us to give people credit for doing a great job when the truth might be that they were simply given a great job…

• Status Quo Bias

• Change is part of modern life in any modern organisation and often it happens very quickly; sometimes people will resist change or try to slow it down...

• Statistical Bias

• Statistical bias is not a bias in our minds so much as a bias in the way we collect information...but data only tells us what we ask it to tell us...

• Stereotypical Bias

• Everyone has skills and preferences, but it’s inaccurate and offensive to assume they match up to a person's ethnic, gender identity, sexual orientation or national culture…

• Zero Sum Bias

• Zero sum bias is the idea that if one person gets something, someone else always has to go without, and this bias is often flawed...

• Systemic Bias

• If a bias is shared by large numbers of people it becomes systemic, with the result that a whole organisation or society could become unbalanced on a particular issue…

• Cumulative Bias

• While a single bias might feel quite weak or niche on its own, what if multiple biases over time had favoured or disfavoured a person?

Actions

• What Happens When we Minimise it?

• if we got our biases under control we could look forward to better decisions, increased diversity and a more equitable work environment…

• Overcoming Our Biases

• On this course we’ve learnt about a handful of the most encountered biases, but what can we do to overcome them? In this video we provide six top tips…