A bias is an inappropriate tendency leading to rash decisions or discriminatory practices. Is it true that only narrow-minded people stereotype? The disconcerting truth is that all of us use stereotypes without knowing it. With bigotry, stereotyping is a much bigger problem than we can ever imagine. How progressive a person seems to be on the surface bears little or no relation to how prejudiced he or she is on an unconscious level.
A more startling phenomenon is that our minds are more accustomed to making opinionated associations and thus process them more rapidly and allowing underlying assumptions to show through. These biases are shown towards many different social groups such as the mentally ill, criminals, homosexuals, women, dysfunctional families, elderly and even the poor. The cognitive approach made the simple but profound point that we all use categories or associations to make sense of the world around us to be the judgment of people within a particular situation or may be a set of independently unverifiable facts. Many of these are based on behavioural biases such as framing effect, bangwagon effect, bias blind spot, mere exposure effect, selective perception etc affecting belief formation.
Stereotyping is too much of a good thing. When we use stereotypes, we take in the gender, age, race, and our minds respond with communication that say hostile, stupid, poor, pathetic etc. These qualities are not the reality per se. Some researchers believe that the automatic activation of a stereotype is immediately followed by a conscious check on unacceptable thoughts in people who think that they are not biased. This internal censor successfully restrains overtly biased responses. But there is an overflow of danger which often shows up in our words, expressions and body language.
So where exactly do these stealth bias come from? Though the connections of the conscious mind which eventually become unconscious and subsequently surface again when our mind are split on subjects such as race, gender, sexual orientation, illnesses and mistakes etc. Society talks out loud about justice, equality, and egalitarianism but at the same time, such equality exists only as an ideal. Why did we allow certain knowledge or association to affect our attitude towards others? We create stereotypes e.g. Indians are lazy, women are emotional, school dropouts are useless, criminals are sinner and low life people etc to explain why things are the way they are or rather how we want to perceive them to be. Why can’t we see that stereotyping do not have to be true to serve a purpose and yet can destroy someone’s dignity or even life? Why do people play God when they may not be even aware of what is happening or had happened in another person’s life?
Prejudice is an external expression of imperfection memories that do not necessary have a connection to reality. To eliminate prejudice we have to change our thinking that may influence our behaviors and attitude towards others. According to some researchers, people can weaken the mental links that connect minorities to negative stereotypes and strengthen the ones that connect them to positive conscious beliefs through practice and awareness. Suppose you are at a party and someone tells a racist joke and you laugh. Then you realize that you should not have laughed at the joke. You feel guilty and become focused on your thought processes. Hence, all sorts of cues become associated with laughing at the racist joke i.e. the person who told the joke, the act of telling jokes, being at a party and drinking. The next time you encounter these cues, a warning signal will go off with greater restraint so that you may behave in a more appropriate and charitable manner.
It is clear that the way to get rid of bias is by the roots, by where they come from in the first place. The study of culture may someday tell us where the seeds of prejudice originate while the study of the unconscious shows us just how deeply they are already planted.
