Other people discriminate on the basis or age, sex, national origin, or even silly things such as what university they attended or whether they ask for soda or pop. You don’t. You always look for the best candidate, and that’s that.
Well, it’s not. You suffer from unconscious bias, and your brain is tricking you into thinking you don’t.
Kristen Pressner, Global Head Human Resources, at Roche Diagnostics gave a presentation at UNLEASH in London last week where she addressed the concept of unconscious bias and how our brains lie to us.
That’s right: Your brain tells you that you aren’t biased but the reality is you are biased. All of us are biased. The key is once you understand that unconscious bias exists, there’s a simple test.
To keep reading, click here: Your Brain is Lying to You: Here’s How to Force it to Tell The Truth
Evil HR readers are better than others. That’s not prejudice, just the facts, ma’m.
Well, this is true. My readers are the best and the brightest. Except for the guy who went through and posted on 3 different posts over the weekend and just used foul language. (I deleted them)
Everyone else is awesome.
This is sound advice I have used in the past, for myself and for others. It works for politics (flip liberal/conservative, or “your candidate”/“their candidate”), religion (Judeo-Christian/Muslim, or believer/atheist), or a host of other examples. Diversity is more broad than gender and ethnicity, and so is unconscious bias. It is alive and well all around us. Thanks for the reminder.
To put a secular spin on it, I attempt to use John Rawls’ concept, which he calls the “veil of ignorance”, when making such decisions. It’s just a analogy to provoke empathy: what if it were me at the tail end of the decision-making, regardless of age, sex, etc.? Would the decision still be fair?
One of the women writers that I follow proved this point of bias during a time period she was having a writers block episode. She created a pseudonym name (male) and re-submitted her work for consideration and got not only faster response but a better evaluation of her work ( which eventually got her to complete the work) because of the male name as author. She eventually published under her own name but just proves a point.
I was talking about a present day author but this prejudice has been going on for a long time even Mary Shelley back in the 1800’s had to deal with it.
Question is how to deal with this tendency to be biased.