Welcome to this card on learning about key types of bias. Now, before we get into some of the most common types of bias we see in organisations, I just wanna touch for a moment on why bias exists. So I’m gonna give you a number. The number is 11 million. Now that is the number of bits of information that are hitting our nervous system every single second.
It’s, that’s sights, that’s sounds, that’s touch sensations, that smells, that’s tastes. Now, that’s a lot of information and our brains can only consciously process and be aware of a tiny fraction of that information. Most of it is entering our, our subconscious. In, as the name suggests, a way that we are not consciously aware of.
So how do we navigate and make sense of the world? The brain forms these mental shortcuts, and this is really what biases are at the end of the day. They’re little mental heuristics, mental shortcuts we form to help us navigate the world. And this leads us to a really important point about bias. That bias isn’t an inherently good or a bad thing. It is a natural function of the human brain. We need it to operate in the world. If you have a brain, you have bias, but it does obviously have some unintended consequences where we have unconscious biases against, you know, people of certain ethnicities against certain genders, and that can play out in, in the workplace in unhelpful ways in terms of promotion, recruitment, hiring, behaviour in the work.
So this is why we want to be a bit more aware of the potential for bias and set ourselves up for ways of mitigating unhelpful aspects or harmful aspects of bias. Now there are about 150 identified types of cognitive bias. Now no one can really hold of those all all in mind at the same time and, and think about them.
But we want to give you four that we commonly see in organisational life. This is our ACES model, A-C-E-S. There’s a way of remembering it. So that’s affinity bias, confirmation bias, expediency bias, and status quo bias. Now, as I talk through these and I give some high level examples, have a think about which of these you see playing out in your organisation and how and which of these are potentially more prevalent in your organisation? Cuz every, every workplace is different. So to start with affinity bias. So this is the tendency for us to preference people who we think are like us. So this looks like us, potentially hiring people, promoting people, spending time with people in the workplace who share our interests, who look like us, who are easy to get along with.
And again as with so much of this, this is a bit of a hardwired evolutionary survival mechanism. We think about spending more time with people like us because it’s more predictive of safety. I’m not saying this is true, obviously in the modern environment, in the workplace, but I can more easily predict the behaviour of somebody like me.
So it’s safer in air quotes for me to be spending time with that person. So that’s affinity bias and a little bit about why people have it.
Confirmation bias is the second letter, C is the second letter in our ACES model, confirmation bias. This is where we seek out, we preference, we pay more attention to information that supports our existing viewpoint on something.
So the way this might play out in a workplace is, We have a view that a certain personality type is better for a certain role. So in our hiring process, we look for that personality type. We hire for that personality type and lo and behold, that person is successful. So we, we think we’ve done a good job and we think we’ve made the right decision.
This is discounting for the fact that there might be. Many other types of personality that could equally thrive in that role as well. But we’ve ignored that and we’ve gone and searched for the solution that matches our preconceived notion of what’s true. So that’s confirmation bias.
Expediency bias. This is a fairly common one. So this is the preference for speed over rigour. This is the preference to act quickly rather than stop and consider and make decisions. Now, there’s a lot of systemic pressure in organisation that that can help exacerbate expediency bias. So if there are quarterly targets, if there are, if there are you know, pushes from the top on achieving certain results, that can obviously lead to people, acting quickly and not necessarily stopping to consider what happened.
But a key component of inclusion is taking the time to explore different viewpoints, to get different perspectives on something and to see where we might have gaps and where we might be wrong. So if your organisation over-indexes on speed, as so many tech organisations, for example, that we work with do, what you can often miss out on is, exploring different perspective.
The last letter in our ACES model is S, S for status quo bias. So this is the preference for people to, for things to stay the way they are. So for things to stay the same. We know from some research that was done by NLI, that 20 to 30% of people will resist a change initiative just because it is a change initiative, even if it directly benefits them.
So people are afraid of change because change means that I might not be relevant, I might not be as valuable. I like things the way they are, and change is a threat. So a lot of people will resist that. And organisations who have hired for culture fit, not culture ads, they’ve been hiring the same type of people because they fit with the culture, might have over-indexed on people who are leaning towards a more heavy status quo bias and the result is potentially inertia, lack of innovation in an organisation.
So those are the four types of bias. Hopefully as I was talking through some of those, you would’ve been nodding your head with a one or two of them in recognition that those are playing out in your organisation. So the opportunity here is for you to reflect more deeply on that. I would encourage you to share this with your team as well and have this as a team discussion.
And also think about ways that you can think with your team about mitigating these, where they pop up. Come up with a shared team contract that you can call out, for example, where we think there might be confirmation bias at play. The thing about unconscious bias, it’s really hard for us to see it in ourself, and that’s why it’s unconscious bias.
But we can more readily spot it in teams and in individuals around us. So, I’ll leave you with that. Have fun with exploring different types of bias.
