Bias and prejudice are both attitudes that favor one group over another in a way considered to be unfair. Explicit biases are the overt prejudiced beliefs and attitudes that people express while implicit biases are the unconscious attitudes and stereotypes that influence behaviors and judgments without people even realizing it.
Definition
Bias is a natural human inclination for or against an idea, object, group, or individual. Everyone has biases, but they are often unconscious and can be detrimental. In addition to being a part of our natural human inclinations, bias can also be influenced by factors like your cultural and social upbringing, gender identity, or educational background.
Biases are based on stereotypes, and they can be positive or negative. They can also change over time. For example, a prejudice that is rooted in stereotypical beliefs about the physical characteristics of a particular group may shift as new groups come into contact with this same group. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, some people were openly hostile towards Asian-Americans because of their perceived connection to this disease.
Prejudice is a form of bias that can be defined as a preconceived opinion or attitude about an individual or group of individuals. It is an emotionally charged, irrational, and unfounded belief or feeling about an individual or group of individuals that can lead to discrimination, which is a form of unequal treatment. Examples of prejudice include a bias in favor of one gender over the other, a bias towards or against a specific race or ethnicity, and a biased view of mental health.
There are three processes that contribute to prejudice: categorization, stereotyping, and discrimination. Categorizing is a tendency to lump together groups of individuals with similar characteristics. For example, if you have a tendency to categorize people who are older than you as slow and outdated, this may be a result of your unconscious biases. Stereotyping is a cognitive bias that involves associating certain qualities or attributes with a particular group of individuals. For instance, if you believe that all people with a certain medical condition are violent, this is a cognitive bias called stereotyping. Discrimination is a behavioral bias that causes you to treat members of a group unfairly.
Both biases and prejudice can have a negative impact on individuals, communities, and society. Understanding how bias and prejudice work can help us address these issues and create a more inclusive and equitable world.
Examples
A bias is an attitude that prevents impartial judgment of ideas or people. A prejudice is a preconceived mindset that prevents one from being open to new ideas or people and instead leads to hatred, racism and other kinds of discrimination. Examples of biases include personal bias, media bias, and conformity bias. A personal bias is a belief that something is more important or desirable than it really is. Media bias is when news outlets pick stories that appeal to the owners of the outlet. For example, a celebrity who wears certain designer jewelry is more likely to get a story than another person who doesn't wear any.
While blatant biases are easy to see, subtle biases can be more difficult to identify. These unconscious beliefs, called implicit biases, are unexamined and often based on stereotypes. They can affect decisions in a variety of ways, from hiring and promotions to choices of schools and housing. They may also influence split-second, life-or-death decisions by police officers and others involved in dangerous situations.
Some researchers believe that implicit biases can be influenced by training, mindfulness and self-reflection. Some suggest that organizations should use objective data when assessing performance and awarding promotions to reduce the risk of biased judgments.
Other researchers have found that hidden biases can be revealed in laboratory experiments. One classic experiment, for example, showed that interviewers with a hidden bias against black candidates sat farther away from them, made more speech errors and ended their interviews 25% sooner than they did with white applicants. They also had more activity in the part of their brain associated with emotions when shown pictures of black faces compared to white ones.
Both biases and prejudices can have negative effects on individuals and society as a whole. Individuals who experience bias or prejudice may feel marginalized, leading to feelings of low self-esteem and depression. The societal impact of bias and prejudice is often seen in social and economic inequality and limited opportunities for many groups of people. The good news is that both bias and prejudice can be reduced by promoting awareness, empathy and understanding of the impact on all types of people.
Relationship or relatedness to other key cognitive biases
Bias is a deviation from normal standards of judgment and can be positive or negative. A bias can lead to false inferences, assessments or perceptions that dictate behavior or attitudes. For example, if you encounter a dark shadow that appears to be following you in an alley, your cognitive bias may lead you to assume that it’s a mugger and that you need to quickly exit the alley.
Biases are triggered by a range of factors including emotions, the brain’s limitations and the complexity of the environment in which you live. You can also have a hard time making decisions if you have too much information to process (the decision overload effect). You’ll likely be more biased when you’re feeling negative emotions such as fear or anger.
Blatant biases are more obvious than cognitive biases because they’re often based on personal experiences or on cultural norms. Examples of blatant bias include racism, religious prejudice and discrimination based on age, gender, socioeconomic status or disability.
The most important thing to remember about biases is that they’re not your fault. It’s not your fault that you experience them and it’s not your fault that people around you do as well. They’re simply part of your innate human behavior and are a result of the limitations of your brain.
A common mistake is to assume that if you know about a specific bias, you can’t fall victim to it. While this is true to a degree, many of these biases are so ingrained and automatic that they’re nearly impossible to avoid entirely.
For example, the hindsight bias is a common cognitive bias that makes you see past events as more predictable than they actually were when they happened. The choice-supportive bias is another example, where you tend to remember the options that you chose as having more positive attributes than they did when you first considered them. The denomination effect is a related bias that can cause you to spend less money in one lump sum than you would in individual increments. There are a variety of other cognitive biases, such as the illusory correlation effect and the loss aversion bias, that can influence your thinking and behaviors.
Conclusions
Prejudice is a mindset that leads to the irrational treatment of members of a group. This can lead to negative stereotypes that are reinforced by interactions in the real world and prevent people from learning about other groups and understanding them. It can also affect the workplace and lead to a lack of diversity and inclusion efforts. It is important to understand the differences and similarities between bias and prejudice so you can be aware of your own assumptions and make a conscious effort to correct them.
There are many different types of cognitive biases that can contribute to prejudice. These include anchoring, where we focus on an initial impression and ignore subsequent information; the halo effect, where a single positive trait can influence our overall view of a person or group; hindsight bias, where we think we could have predicted something that happened more easily than it actually was; and survivorship bias, where we tend to concentrate on successes over failures.
Other factors that can affect our judgment and perceptions are ambiguity bias, misinformation effect, optimism bias, self-serving bias, and the sunk cost fallacy. These can all contribute to biased decision-making and faulty reasoning that can have negative consequences.
The differences between bias and prejudice can be challenging to recognize, but it is possible to reduce them by raising awareness and promoting empathy. One study found that just one week after a short social contact intervention, participants showed lower explicit and implicit prejudiced beliefs than their control counterparts. The findings support the parasocial contact hypothesis that interpersonal interaction can positively influence societal beliefs by broadcasting norms and inspiring an internal motivation to reduce prejudiced attitudes.
Although the results of this study were encouraging, the sample size was limited. In addition, participants were measured on implicit measures of prejudice using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). These measures are less reliable than explicit prejudiced measures and may require a more intensive approach to change the beliefs that underlie them. In future research, it would be beneficial to use an alternative implicit measure of prejudice, such as electroencephalography or heart rate monitoring, in combination with the IAT to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions.