Unconscious Bias and Corporate Culture
I was working on Ethics of Artificial intelligence, a few years before. I had to do an exercise to understand human behavior, when it comes to ethics. Since, in future, Robots with Artificial Intelligence will learn from human actions and behaviors, it is essential to identify the human flaws in order to rectify them, which might in turn lead to a flawless education to the AI robots. The exercise was to conduct a survey on a total population of 25 members. The survey consisted of two questions:
1) What will you do if you find an abandoned $100 bill on the pavement?
2) What will you do if you find an abandoned kitten on the roadside?
The first question yielded 19 different answers, while the second one yielded only 3 answers from the group 25 random volunteers. Some of the answers to the first question were
1) I will donate to charity.
2) I will donate to a religious cause.
3) I will donate to a medical research.
4) I will eat a good meal in an expensive restaurant etc.,
The answers to the second questions were only 3
1) I will drop it off at a pet clinic or pet center.
2) I will take it home and care for it.
3) I will try to find the owners and give it back to them.
When the question was about how do you handle a material entity which might enhance your life, the answers were completely implicit as human brain took whole control of the process and the unconscious desire towards research, charities, religion, food and many more came to surface. Nonetheless, when the question was about how do you handle another abandoned life, the answers were controlled and explicit as unconscious human brain felt powerless to exercise control.
When I completed the task, I understood the concept of how information processing is handled by our brains. The two modes which happens when any information is handled are
1) Controlled (Explicit — intentional behavior demands more attention)
2) Automatic (Implicit — cognitive, difficult to suppress)
Another important observation made from the study was the lack of thinking towards donating the kitten to a charity or to sell it in order to eat in a good restaurant. In other words, Human brain does not consider ‘Adopting an abandoned kitten as a wrong thing’, while it unconsciously decides, ‘Picking up an abandoned currency note as an act of stealing and hence it tries to justify the action through various charitable acts’. This is an extreme good example for what Aristotle remarked,
“There are no evil or good people, there are only evil and good thoughts and how the evil thoughts can be controlled and channeled towards good, makes the person better than the rest of the crowd.”
This is true even when we are dealing with official matters too. Our unconscious bias and prejudices towards race, ethnicity, religion, gender and sexual orientation affect our decision making process and not many of us understand of idea of these flawed decisions, affecting the culture of the organization we work for. So I thought it will be better to handle this to make sure, my audience don’t become the victim of unconscious bias at their work.
I have chosen the following biases such as Implicit social cognition, Confirmation bias, Stereotypes, Affinity bias, Halo effect and Perception bias. My discussion is focused on how the biases can influence a person’s behavior and how their moral compass deflects based on the same, which in turn might affect the corporate culture of the organization they work for, especially if the person works in the Middle level or Executive level of management, as a flawed decision at this level will hurt the organization, excessively.
Implicit social cognition
The definition of implicit social cognition as per psychology dictionary is
the knowledge or information got from perception or memory which influences a person’s behavior while making social evaluations, without them being consciously aware of what they are doing.
Implicit cognition results in implicit attitudes. As per Greenwald and Banaji, Research associates and advisers at Yale and Ohio Universities, Implicit attitude is defined as,
“Introspectively unidentified (or inaccurately identified) traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects”.
Here social objects can be social problems such as diversity, respect towards to a community, religion, culture etc., To cite an example for this, a bad experience with a class mate at middle school, who belonged to a Jewish religion, might unconsciously develop into anti-Semitic bias and can influence the decisions[UC1] made related to Jewish community, later on in the life. Let’s say this person becomes a HR manager for a financial firm and he has to take a decision between two candidates (one being a Jew and other not) will unconsciously decide to select the non-Jew, even if his scores are slightly poorer than the candidate who is a Jew. This will in turn affect the corporate culture, especially, if this action goes unnoticed or worse rewarded, that happens too at times, without the knowledge of this unconscious bias happening. Thus Implicit social cognition clouds a person’s judgement in differentiating between good and evil or high achiever and a mediocre.
Confirmation Bias
This bias, [UC2] is quite common among data analysts. This bias is based on some assumptions. The data researcher will start his work with this pre-assumptions, which might affect his/her work in making a good analysis, considerately. The main reason for this type of bias is the explicit bias. A good example for this being an analysis made on DACA immigration policy [UC3] recipients.
I recently read an article on ‘How well DACA recipients are performing?’ This blog was written to influence the people through social media on the benefits of continuing DACA as an immigration policy. The charts showed the DACA beneficiaries’ productivity in three major areas by listing their performance academically, professionally and personally, through College or University qualifications, Jobs at Fortune 500 companies and Real estate achievements. The chart was pretty impressive to look at the first instant, because the academic percentage was 58%, the professional achievements stood at 47% and the home buyer percentage was 28%. But when I did a Google search, the numbers were quite low. Then I went back to the article to check what I missed to notice. The data which the article was projecting was based on a Survey conducted in Silicon Valley, California and there is no mention of the population size at all. This is referred as ‘Confirmation Bias’. The author of the article was trying to prove his pre assumptions, which are
1) The DACA recipients are doing really good
2) The DACA immigration Policy is good to United States of America.
In order to prove his pre-assumptions, the analyst, ignored two important facts
1) The number of DACA recipients as per the USCIS 2018 survey was around 640,000 and the people are quite scattered across the United States of America.
2) A small population in Northern California, does not reflect the achievements of all the DACA recipients.
Thus the analyst allowed his pre-assumptions to cloud his/her correct judgement leading to a biased opinion. If that person is allowed to make a decision for a company, then it may lead to more legal complications than ethical ones, as he was may be willing to violate the law of the land to prove his pre-assumptions.
Stereotypes
The definition of Stereotype as per Oxford online dictionary is,
“a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing”.
Stereotypical behavior generates overreaction to a type which the stereotype confirms and under reaction to the type, which the stereotype contradicts. In most cases, stereotypes lead to social categorization, resulting in a society which lacks wisdom based on truth. Some examples of stereotypes are as follows,
“All women are poor in Math”,
“Geeks are not cool”,
“Coders can’t write English” etc.,
While these stereotypes sound ridiculous, a few stereotypes are fairly true too. The examples of such being,
“Europeans are tall”,
“Swedes are blond”,
“Italians are merrymakers”, etc.,
The stereotypes mostly refer to a race, community, gender or an ethnicity. Stereotypical behavior is not always disadvantageous, since stereotypes are judgements made based on some psychological heuristics. In some cases, stereotypes help make a quicker decision as they simplify the representation of a heterogeneous group. Consider this example. A boss has to make a decision about two trainees one male and one female who have joined his department after successful completion of training. Both of them opted for implementation team. Without a moment of hesitation, the boss declined the female candidate’s request and moved her to Research, Development and Design team, while the male was given his choice. The girl[UC4] who was dejected in the beginning about her boss’s decision, became the head of the R & D team in 12 years, while the boy who was given his choice, became the Head of Marketing in 15 years. In this case, the stereotype about women not knowing to code helped her to excel in her field. But this situation is not true in most cases in specific when generalization is based on high probability statistics. The stereotype, “All republicans are rich”, is got from the idea of many Republicans being richer than the Democrats way before Hollywood and Silicon Valley sprung up as economic power houses in United States of America. The below image is a depiction of feminist stereotypes as Emma Hyland portrays. Stereotypes leads to discrimination at work place, educational institutions and cultural events leading to some highly distasteful behavior through systematically exaggerating the differences between groups even when those differences are negligible.
Affinity bias
Affinity bias is a bias which happens as we develop a like or a dislike towards people who are similar to us. This bias leads to a culture of surrounding us with people who makes us comfortable, in order to create a secure work environment. Affinity bias affect organization culture as employees use this bias in interactions, personnel development and allocation of responsibilities. Many managers feel a sub ordinate who behaves like him or who reminds him/her of their younger self will do a good job. This is wrong in many occasion as it mounts too much expectations and exerts unnecessary work pressure leading to a project failure or a bad recruitment. Addressing affinity bias is a first step towards improving our cultural intelligence. It is imperative to identify and accept good behavior and right attitude beyond boundaries.
Affinity bias makes managers look petty and self-oriented. Every time a person exercises this bias to surround or get rid of people similar to them, they either show their lack of interpersonal, intercultural and international knowledge or the excess of it. In order to remove this, it is important to identify the presence of it and it needs to be consciously addressed, by agreeing to the idea people of talent come from different races, different sex, different nationality and different attributes.
Halo effect
This is unconscious impression made on a group or a single person. It ignores the idea of ‘Multi talented people are rare’ . It promotes the concept of ‘one area of expertise confirms automatically their ingenuity in another field too’. I can explain this bias with an excellent example. Celebrities trying to enter politics, because they have a good fan base and good amount of twitter followers, does not always make them good administrators, as politics is more about administrative skills than about anything else. If an executive promotes a coder to a be portfolio manager, because the person is good technically then it is halo effect. Halo effect is based on the trust which the bosses and colleagues have on their subordinates. This works positive sometimes, if the person takes the job seriously and gets the necessary training, as he does not want to fail the trust others had on him. Nonetheless, this will be a 10% scenario and the 90% scenario leads to commotion, confusion, delay and failure. Halo effect is a big concept which PMI handles while training their managers, as middle level project managers in future, go on to become executives and one wrong decision by an executive changes the corporate decisions thoroughly.
Perception bias
This bias is due to lack of questioning. What we see is what we perceive, it may necessarily not be true. An unbiased person will question his/her perceptional knowledge and try or seek the honest truth. I give a movie scene, I watched a long time before as an example. A rich heroine gives a surprise visit to her boyfriend, who is not so rich. As she steps out of her chauffeur driven Mercedes and enters her boyfriend’s humble abode, she encounters an old sweaty man who is tending to the garden. Due to her perceptional bias, she automatically perceives a gardener, who in fact, is her boyfriend’s dad. Without questioning the information she receives from her environment, she immediately steps to a conclusion based on her limited knowledge about working class people.
This happens in organizations too. Managers see and make decisions and thus leading to a perception bias. A manager who is walking a shop floor, sees a worker on phone and immediately decides he is slacking and fires him without further questioning. While all along the worker is using his phone to get help to solve a crisis using a recent AR technology, which is on the testing phase. This quick decision will reflect on the organizational culture if not addressed properly and immediately.
As I conclude this article, I know I have not even scraped the surface of the topic, as I have discussed only a main few biases which came to my mind. If anyone who is new to the topic and who does a Google search will encounter at least 20 different types of biases. I have tried to give a short list with a small explanation though in the slides, in an unfulfilled effort to do justice to the topic I chose to discuss about.
[UC1] Which may turn into actions.
[UC2] I have mentioned confirmation bias as an unconscious bias because many psychologists think it is implicit, though I differ in certain aspects. As per my opinion, confirmation bias can be explicit too, as the pre-assumptions can be faked for financial or political gains.
[UC3] DACA(Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival) is an immigration policy of United States of America adopted by President Obama to give a fair chance for those illegal immigrants who are brought into USA by their parents when they are children. The law gives them 2 years of deferred deportation and provide a work permit to prove their worth in USA.
[UC4] This is an example from my personal experience.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
