The elephant in the room—the one everyone recognises—is overt bias: those charmingly blatant attitudes and prejudices someone proudly wears on their sleeve. It’s delightfully obvious and enables some truly impressive mental gymnastics.
Then there’s the other elephant—the one lurking in the shadows, rarely discussed. This is unconscious bias: our hidden preferences for or against a person, thing, or group, neatly tucked away where even we can’t see them. Despite our best efforts to be impeccably fair-minded, we might harbour deep-seated resistance to differences—race, gender, physical traits, personality types, sexual orientation, you name it. How embarrassing.
Exploration
We are all, alas, products of our time and place—the moment we wake up, the conditioning begins. Fancy a bit of self-discovery? Have a go at Project Implicit and explore your own biases. We did. Quite enlightening, if mildly mortifying.
The Making Of…
Unconscious biases are the brain’s little DIY projects—crafted from our personal definitions of “normal,” shaped by past experiences (including well-intentioned failures), our social bubbles, and whatever the media has been shouting about lately. The amusing bit? These hidden biases can stubbornly persist even when they directly contradict our conscious beliefs. So much for self-awareness.
Body language
Hidden biases have a knack for slipping out when we’re stressed, distracted, or simply too relaxed to bother with decorum. They reveal themselves in subtle ways—eye contact (or lack thereof), nervous blinking, forced smiles. A real masterclass in social awkwardness.
Turtle
Apparently, the prejudice and stereotyping process is a bit like a turtle—slow, methodical, and involving an unnecessarily complex network of brain regions.
Prejudice
The amygdala—that overactive almond deep in the brain—is responsible for emotional processing and, more importantly, snap judgements. It’s the reason we instinctively distrust strangers or assume the worst based on a single glance. Handy for dodging sabre-toothed tigers, less so for modern social interactions.
This little neural drama queen treats social threats like physical ones, triggering fight-or-flight (or, in polite company, tend-and-befriend). Unconscious bias, then, is essentially our brain’s knee-jerk reaction to “other”—jumping to conclusions with all the grace of a startled cat.
Stereotyping
If prejudice is the amygdala overreacting dramatically, stereotyping is the cerebral cortex’s more “considered” (read: still flawed) contribution. It’s the bit that lazily categorises people into neat little boxes based on perceived traits. This involves higher-order thinking—or at least the illusion of it—drawing on memory, social norms, and a questionable sense of fairness. This, we like to tell ourselves, is who we really are.
Cognitive effects
Together, these two systems ensure our higher reasoning takes the occasional unscheduled holiday. Unconscious bias can make even the most rational minds malfunction like a poorly coded app.
The good news? While the knee-jerk reactions of the amygdala are stubborn, they’re not set in stone. Meditation helps. So does gradual exposure to situations we’d normally avoid (or people we’d instinctively side-eye). With enough effort, we might just nudge ourselves in the right direction—or at least stop embarrassing ourselves in public.
