“Nobody wants to be accused of having a bias.”
The word “bias” has become, as Dr. Bezio pointed out in her podcast, a rather nasty word that people tend to avoid association with. I find this interesting because, let’s be honest, we all have biases. Whether it’s conscious or subconscious, we all have some sort of bias that influences our everyday choices. Like Dr. Bezio says in her podcast, we can’t really help it; our brains are designed to seek out patterns. We still have these ingrained survival mechanisms in our minds. We inherently try and relate things to other things, like the cloud example: they’re just clouds with no specific shape or pattern, yet we watch them to see if they take form as animals we can identify.
It’s this sort of instinctual pattern-making our minds do that really intrigues me. Because, if we didn’t have this natural instinct, this implicit bias, where would we be? Could we not make any connections, because the idea of making any connections implies being biased? Take the cloud example: one person says a cloud looks like a pen, another person says the same cloud actually looks like a sword. In a world without implicit bias, do both agree on one or the other, or do they avoid “matching” the cloud to a different object altogether?
So, in a way, bias is a good thing—in certain cases. Dr. Bezio goes in-depth in her podcast about how bias tends to fuel the “-isms”: racism, sexism, ableism, and so on. So how do we separate “good” from “bad” bias? Or is there any possibility of separation at all? Patterns and culture are a crucial part of growing up and developing traditions, personality traits, and decision-making skills, so how do we ensure we grow up with those characteristics and simultaneously ban implicit bias? I think it’s an incredibly fine line to walk, and the answer may never be found.
I find this take on bias to be really interesting. I agree with you that we all have a natural bias. It is within our nature. However, I did not think about it in terms of making connections within humanity. Does bias in some ways help society? If it does, in what ways can we only use good bias? Good job with your blog post.
I think you make a really interesting point here. Most of us associate the world “bias” with cultural Biases and -isms, but your concept of if there are good bias’ or not is something I have personally not thought about. Whether good bias exists or not, since our society so often and heavily uses the word in a negative context, I don’t know if there would be any way to normalize the idea of a “good bias”, or any way to separate “good” from “bad”, or if it even exists. In the context of the podcast, cultural bias’ was what was specifically discussed, and I do not think there is really such a thing as a “good” cultural (implicit) bias. Although certain elements of the bias may be true for some people, just assuming something rather than taking the time to learn about it is never really a good thing.
I like how you point out that biases are simply part of our brain’s response to seeking to find patterns in order to process information. When you think of biases in that way, I think they become framed as much less foreign and “dirty.” In a similar line of thought, our brain finds faces in inanimate objects. Although we are consciously aware that the faces we see do not really exist, our brain still chooses to see them until we remind it that they are not there. I wonder if we can do the same with our other biases, through recognizing why we have them and then “unseeing” them.
I really appreciate your nuanced look at what bias can mean. I agree with you and Dr. Bezio that bias is a natural human instinct that we needed to survive, and looking for patterns is very much something we’ve been trained to do. I think recognition that we do this is an important first step to being able to discern what are fair and useful biases, and which are incredibly harmful.