Part 1 – What is unconscious bias

What exactly are unconscious biases? 

• Biases are essentially existing, primary knowledge and beliefs that influence our behaviour in particular situations or contexts.
• Unconscious biases are ingrained patterns, assumptions, and interpretations that we are not aware of. Unconscious biases are created by our brain, which uses mental shortcuts to help us make quicker decisions and judgments based on our past experiences.
• Everyone has unconscious beliefs about different social, identity and cultural groups in their mind which migrants could be easily associated with, and these biases are the result of their tendency to organize the image of society through all kinds of categorization.
• Unconscious biases are a much more common phenomenon than conscious biases and are often completely at odds with the conscious values that people incorporate. ^[1][2][3]

Types of unconscious biases:

• Confirmation bias – Confirmation bias is a type of unconscious bias that causes people to pay more attention to information that is consistent with their views, beliefs, and value system and to downplay information that they consider to be contrary to their own perception of the world.
• Attribution biases – These biases cause people to evaluate behaviours, actions, and circumstances more favourably for people in their “inner groups” and less favourably, and sometimes even critically, when evaluating similar or the same behaviours/situations for people outside of their chosen group. In this case, behaviour toward a particular person is influenced by personal dislike or disaffection. The attribution bias might influence the migrant’s assimilation in a new environment.
• Availability bias – This type of bias is people’s unconscious selection of so-called “high profile” information, which often leads to poor decision making and exclusion of specific individuals or groups. An example that illustrates this bias is the tendency to automatically imagine men as “leaders” and women as “supporters” or “helpers”.
• Affinity bias – This is a tendency in which a person automatically shows more sympathy and attention to people who are similar to them in terms of behaviour, views, interests, background, etc., making them more likely to establish a friendly relationship with them. This leads to people inadvertently overlooking others and focusing all their energy on building relationships with people similar to themselves.^[4]
• In-group bias – This type of bias is when a person tends to be sympathetic to one particular group of people of their choice, while being usually hostile to members of a less accepted and liked group.^[5]