“Nobody wants to be accused of having a bias.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0any\u00a0<\/em>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?<\/p>\n So, in a way, bias is a good thing\u2014in 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?\u00a0 I think it’s an incredibly fine line to walk, and the answer may never be found.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4585,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4585"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6309"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6311,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6309\/revisions\/6311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}