We are constantly making decisions that are influenced by unconscious biases. In fact, even when our biases seem conscious, they may be influenced by a pattern of unconscious assumptions that we have absorbed throughout our lives. It is like a polluted river. We may do everything we can to clean the river as it flows downstream, without having any consciousness about the pollutants that are being dumped in it by a factory or sewage plant upstream.
Consider the biases that people clearly have in our society today toward LGBTQ people. We have gone through a generation in which we have seen breakthroughs in marriage equality: the end of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military; a dramatic shift in the presence of LGBTQ actors and actresses and themed programs in the arts; a lesbian elected mayor of Houston, Texas, and even a gay man running for president. And yet, bias against LGBTQ people continues to proliferate.
A May 13, 2013, Gallup poll found that 45 percent of the American public believed that same-sex marriages should not be valid.[2] Even after two July 2013 rulings by a conservative U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for same-sex marriage in California and established, by declaring unconstitutional the Defense of Marriage Act, that same-sex couples were eligible for federal benefits under the law, overt discrimination and resistance to the rights of LGBTQ people still persists. Even in the entertainment industry, where most people see a great deal of open expression of sexual orientation, a Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists study found that “the survey, based on responses from over 5,600 union members, showed nearly half of lesbian and gay respondents and 27 percent of bisexual respondents ‘strongly agreed’ that producers and studio executives believe that lesbian and gay performers are less marketable.”[3]
However, are even these overt biases truly “conscious”? While there is no doubt many people are aware of the fact that they are uncomfortable or downright hostile to LGBTQ people, the cause for those animosities might still be unconscious. From where do these biases come? Most of us were probably quite young when we started to hear that “boys should play with these toys, but not those.” How old were most of us when we first saw modeling among the people around us about what was “normal” and what was “sick,” “sinful,” “gross,” or other such descriptors? When we started going to our places of worship and hearing about biblical readings? When we heard people telling jokes about gays or lesbians?
As Brett Pelham, the associate executive director for graduate and postgraduate education at the American Psychological Association, has said, “virtually all bias is unconscious bias. We have learned to trust women to be nurturing and men to be powerful, for example, in much the same way that Pavlov’s puppies trusted ringing bells to predict the arrival of meat powder. . . . Being biased is how we get through life without evaluating everything afresh every time we experience it.”
Even when our biases are conscious downstream, their upstream causes may be very much hidden in our unconscious. For a long time, it has been our general belief that stereotypes and biases were the purview of bigoted people. However, an explosion of studies about the unconscious over the past two decades is revealing a truth that is very uncomfortable. All people use biases and stereotypes, all of the time. And all of us do so without realizing that we are doing it.
In any case, what is bias? Why do we have it?
Bias has been defined as “a particular tendency or inclination, especially one that prevents unprejudiced consideration of a question.”[4]
While we have generally thought about bias in relationship to people and prejudice, we have biases in all aspects of our lives. We are biased toward particular kinds of television shows or movies, certain foods or kinds of foods, as well as certain kinds of books or stories. Virtually any preference we have is likely to have some bias associated with us. And they are, for the most part, unconscious.
This doesn’t mean that every time we make a wrong determination about somebody that it is based on bias. In that sense, it is important to distinguish between what we might call “logical fallacies” and biases. People do sometimes follow faulty logic that leads to an error in reasoning. When we take a position about something based on that faulty logic, we call that a fallacy. Biases, on the other hand, result from times when we have some kind of “glitch” in our thinking. These may result from social conditioning, belief systems that we have been taught or exposed to, particular incidents that we remember, or any number of other assumed “truths” that we have picked up along the way.
The question of bias has entered the political arena, as well as the question of whether biases can often be associated with one political philosophy or another. However, the degree to which we see ourselves as “progressive” or “liberal” on these issues, or the degree to which we may have been the victim of other people’s biases has little or no impact on the unconscious biases we may possess. Ironically, on an unconscious level, somebody (even a person of color) who sees himself as liberal on racial issues, for example, may have unconscious biases that are not much different from those possessed by an overt racist. Or somebody who sees herself as progressive on gender issues might still have hidden gender-based biases.
For instance, consider the attitudes that people have toward men and women regarding who is more suited to a career and who is more suited to staying at home. When researchers at the University of Virginia asked men and women to respond on a conscious level as to how strongly they associated women with careers, the differences between men and women were quite pronounced. Women were almost twice as likely to see a connection between women and careers and men almost twice as likely to not see that connection. However, when tested to see what their unconscious attitudes are to the same question, the disparity almost disappeared. It turns out that on an unconscious level, the differential is less than 20 percent. On an unconscious level, we all have absorbed the same stereotypes and have similar internal value systems, often completely inconsistent with our conscious values!
How might this difference in perception show up on a day-to-day basis? Perhaps, in assumptions that leaders make about a woman’s willingness to travel and be away from her family or take an overseas job assignment. Or in how willing a woman might be to ask for something that she needs, or a raise in pay. Or in how much credibility we give to claims of sexual harassment. Or in how much a man might listen to a woman’s point of view. Or how comfortable men or women feel about women with children working on flextime arrangements, even when it is stated company policy to allow such arrangements! The dissonance between our conscious value systems and our unconscious drivers can cause confusion to both ourselves and other people who are observing us.
These are often subtle perceptions. Like the story about the father and son in the airplane crash, we don’t consciously say, “I’m going to ignore the possibility that the doctor could be the mother or the other gay father!” Yet, those images or thoughts don’t even occur to us as we contemplate the problem. Bias serves as a fundamental protective mechanism for human beings.
Psychologist Joseph LeDoux has referred to bias as an unconscious “danger detector” that determines the safety of a person or situation, before we even have a chance to cognitively consider it.[5] For example, in more primitive times, if we came across a group of people around the river drawing water, we had to decide instantly whether it was “them” or “us.” The wrong choice might have led to our death. We learned, through evolution, that making those determinations quickly could save our lives. Unconscious bias comes from social stereotypes, attitudes, opinions, and stigma we form about certain groups of people outside of our own conscious awareness, and can be fed by snippets of information that we might get from biased media or social media or other sources, which are often taken out of context.
The same is true when we encounter other circumstances in life. We teach our children to have a “bias” about the danger in crossing streets. We want them to instinctively stop at the curb when they are chasing a ball or walking to school. We do the same when we are determining whether a stove is hot or cold. We cautiously touch it to test it. Our