Unconscious bias
When we come across someone new, our brains are wired to make judgments on the person based on our world view, our past experiences, or how we think the person should perform especially when comparing them with someone else in an unfair way. This is referred to as biasness, and when it is done from outside the other person’s awareness, it is commonly referred to as unconscious bias. Unconscious bias has been termed to have various effects on the victim and also to the person judging. According to the feature presented by the speaker, unconscious bias can have some of these impacts.
First, to those who are designing and coming up with various ideas based on the unconscious bias of their users, they tend to have their ideas limited. For instance, a person designing a children’s program and judge that children have not developed intellectually, he may end up building a boring program to the children for his development is limited to the idea that children are not yet ready for exploring and adventure. Second, for the recruiters who judge their candidates based on how they view the candidates, they may end up leaving qualified candidates, and pick unqualified candidates, just because the qualified candidate did not match a particular successful employee in the company, but the unqualified have similar facials like a particular successful employee. Third, unconscious bias hinders us from acknowledging the power available in everyone else, for everyone is said to be blessed differently, and powerfully, and we only have to remove the bias to notice the power in them. Finally, the assumptions that we tend to make, lower our ability as a leader, or any other responsibilities that we have leading to our failure or underperforming.
There are many situations that I have held assumptions of my own on things I could do and things I could not do, as a result, I have ended up missing several chances that could have been worthwhile in my career or having fun. Eliminating of unconscious bias may be difficult since it is like it is wired into the human brain. In some situations though, it can be evitable by focusing on knowing the person before you judge them.