Have you ever been in a situation where you were blamed even for doing nothing? I am sure most of you have been in that situation. I have been there too. I was working in a multinational organization, about four years back. In the beginning I was a good performer and I delivered on all my deliverable, and that too following the SMART strategy, barring a few. There were times when I could not deliver but I always tried my best, depending on the situation. Now one day, my manager got promoted and she was replaced by another another lady from our team. And then things began to go south. Problems crept up, she began to find faults in everything I do, and she always had this intention to reprimand me in the team meetings.

Things just got worsened one day. A priority 2 issue came up at about 9 PM at night, just at the moment when we were about to leave. I informed her, despite all the differences but to my utter surprise, she remarked, “It is your fault. You are responsible for this. Don’t expect anything from me and I expect this to be solved latest by tomorrow morning.” I knew something like this would happen but I never imagined the utter intensity of the remark. Moreover, when I analysed the situation, I found out that I was never responsible for the issue in the first place. One of my team mate, in fact a senior team member missed to pay attention to the issue a month back, due to which the client had to send it as a priority 2 issue. That was it. The next morning, when my manager came, I explained everything to her, but she was clouded in her own judgement to even listen to me and understand.

That was simply the case of unconscious bias. Because of past incidents and events, her judgement was clouded to let her think straight and logically. Unconscious bias was the main reason which affected her thinking and making the rightful decision. But what she failed to understand is that this little judgement of her can have profound effect on the hiring, motivation and retention decisions. In our day to day interaction, we might not be even aware of when such kind of bias creeps into our decisions and plays havoc in our mind. As per recent news, such unconscious bias can create a turnover impact of INR 22000 per associate. Surprising, isn’t it?

Now when we talk about unconscious bias, there are multiple instances and multiple effects of such bias and each of it has its own term. A few of them are:

1. Affinity Bias – When we come across a person who is similar to us, we tend to give positive response to him. It seems like we tend to identify ourselves with that person.
2. Halo Bias – Because of some praiseworthy and commendable actions of the past, we tend to see that person in the positive light and admire all of his actions even though he might not have quite lived up to expectations in the present.
3. Perception Bias – It is the tendency to form stereotypes and assumptions about certain groups which makes it difficult to form an objective opinion about individual members of that group.
4. Horn Bias – Because of a negative incident in the past, all the present judgement gets clouded by that feeling.
5. Confirmation Bias – Tendency to seek out evidence that confirms our initial perceptions and ignoring contradictory information.

These are some of the biases which creeps into our decisions without even our knowledge. Managers should always be neutral which looking at the present situation and not to base the eventuality of the decision based on some past incident. One way to do this is to critically evaluate all the options, put forward by everyone and also to engage a third-party to challenge those options. In this way, our decisions will not be clouded and will be a blessing for everyone.

Referring to the situation which I faced, it was Horn Bias and it could have been easily avoided if she had taken the high road to listen and to communicate with me. But nevertheless, there is always a scope for one to learn in one’s life.

Source: https://builtin.com/diversity-inclusion/unconscious-bias-examples