Do you have a tendency to switch off at meetings every time a particular colleague starts to speak? Is it obvious to you that your colleagues will never accept a peer as a project leader? And doesn’t that candidate from your own alma mater clearly have a definite edge over the others?

How do we come to these conclusions and what can we do to ensure that our decisions are based on objective criteria alone? Can we always be sure that we are not influenced by pre-conceived notions or prejudices that may unconsciously bias our thinking?

Unconscious bias is a part of everyday life – it refers to the insidious influences that our backgrounds, cultural environments or personal experiences exert on the way in which we judge or assess people or situations. In the workplace, it has a negative impact on our goals and interactions when it causes us to make decisions based on generalisations or mental associations that we are not even aware of, and that have little or no bearing on the objective facts at hand.

Bias comes in many different forms, the most familiar of which is the ‘affinity bias’, which refers to the tendency we have to warm to people who are like ourselves, which of course also implies its corollary in that we find it more difficult to appreciate or understand those who appear to hold opinions or values that are very different to our own. There is also a well-known ‘horns and halo’ effect, where we may make negative – or even positive – assumptions about people based on our prior knowledge or experience of them, without paying full attention to the objective facts at hand. A third type of bias stems from the fact that we tend to seek information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs and this may cause blind spots that lead us to listen selectively or filter out factors that do not correspond to our expectations.

These biases cause us to make decisions in favour of one individual or group, often to the exclusion or detriment of others. At work, they can be extremely damaging when decisions to select, promote or develop staff are unwittingly affected by elements such as the physical attributes or appearance of individuals, as well as factors like regional accents, educational background or cultural and gender related behaviours, to which we attribute our own subjective associations.

Even at times when we are convinced of our own objectivity, we cannot escape the risk that we may have fallen prey to prejudice or discriminatory behaviour, and we need to be constantly vigilant and aware of our own biases in order to consciously prevent them from exerting undue influence on our considerations.

However, if we are willing to acknowledge that our thinking may be biased, we may be able to counteract the effect and take three simple steps to identify, weaken and eventually defeat the unconscious biases that may otherwise undermine our decisions. If we are so inclined, a slim volume in the CERN Library, “3 Keys to Defeating Unconscious Bias” by S. Thiederman, could provide us with valuable insights and a few practical steps in that direction.