Bias in the brain: Unconscious, but not invisible

You have a few friends over for dinner. Before dessert, you leave to take your dog for a short walk. During this time, your friends decide to be helpful by clearing the table and doing the dishes. You come back, see what they’ve done, and thank them for all their help - less work for you to do later! 

But you didn’t see what happened in your home between when you left and when you came back to a clean kitchen. You don’t know how your guests washed the dishes or where the dishes were put away. You don’t even think to question it because you’re so relieved that you don’t have to do the cleaning later.

This concept is similar to what happens in the brain. Our brains love to be helpful and reduce our work. They organize concepts and follow processes without our awareness to help us think more efficiently. Most of the time, this is a good thing since our brains are bombarded with so much information and we don’t have the capacity to process all this information consciously. For example, our brain shortcuts can help us quickly recognize a friend or distinguish food from things we shouldn’t eat. But sometimes, our unconscious processes (i.e., processes that happen without our awareness) can lead to biased outcomes.

In this article, you’ll explore:

• How our brains take shortcuts based on what we know.

• Research demonstrating racial bias happening in the brain.

• Brain-based strategies for reducing and counteracting bias.

We use what we know

Let’s go back to your dinner party. Your friends have left, and you open your cupboard to get a clean glass. The glass smells like your fruity hand soap! Maybe the cleaning job wasn’t as good as you thought. A quick tour of the kitchen also shows you that your hand-wash only pan has made its way into the dishwasher. 

Turns out that your friend mistook your hand soap for dish soap because they have dish soap in the same bottle at their home. Another friend has a similar pan and always puts it in the dishwasher without any issues. They didn’t clean your kitchen in the objectively best way - they prioritized efficiency rather than seeking out all available information, and ended up cleaning in a biased way based on what they know and usually do. 

The brain does the same thing. Brains are wired to process unconsciously to help categorize and make associations more efficiently - but the information considered in those unconscious processes is learned (e.g., what categories exist and what belongs in each category).

Bias in, bias out

Biased learning leads to biased processing, which leads to biased outcomes. We learn biased information from many sources, including media, school, work, family, and social groups (see research on gender bias in media, racial bias among teachers, heteronormativity in sex education, and ableism in the workplace). For example, if an individual is mainly exposed to a trait, job, or role in connection with a specific identity or appearance, then those are the associations that the brain has available. They get integrated into brain processes and influence thoughts, decisions, and behaviours.

The connection between biased input and biased output is illustrated by experiments where children drew pictures of scientists. In the 1960s and 70s, when representation of women in science was much less than today, an overwhelming proportion of children would draw a scientist that presents masculine. Over time, the proportion of drawings that feature a feminine scientist has grown. This is consistent with the growing representation of women scientists both in practice and in the media.

If an individual is repeatedly exposed to the combination of “scientist” and “man,” that association forms in the brain just as you would connect “winter” with “colder weather.” While such associations can be productive in many cases (e.g., they prevent you from wearing sandals outside in Canadian winter even if you haven’t checked the forecast), they can be very harmful when they involve individual identities. Such harmful associations in the brain come into play, for example, when:

• Black people are subjected to more frequent and less respectful police stops than white people, related to greater unconscious connection between Black people and crime. Check out Jennifer L. Eberhardt’s research to learn more.

• Women are required to provide more evidence of competence than men (e.g., to get a job or promotion), related to less unconscious connection between women and competence.

Looking inside the biased brain

Even though we can’t feel our unconscious associations and processes as they’re happening, we can see them in the brain with the help of neuroimaging. Research using electroencephalography (EEG) to measure electrical activity in the brain, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure blood oxygen in the brain, can show what a person is paying attention to, what brain regions are most active at a certain time, and how those differ across situations.

A key EEG study on race and gender perception in the brain was conducted by Tiffany Ito and Geoffrey Urland in 2003. They found that attention to race comes very early in processing, about 100 milliseconds (one-tenth of a second) after a photo of a face is presented, followed by attention to gender about 50 milliseconds after. Conscious visual processing only happens at 180 milliseconds at the earliest - meaning that your brain starts unconsciously differentiating between social categories even before you consciously realize you’re looking at a person.

The early attention to race comes with differences in how we perceive the faces of individuals of the same or different race compared to our own. In an fMRI study conducted by Brent Hughes and colleagues in 2019, participants showed brain activity consistent with higher sensitivity to individual features in same-race faces. This suggests an attitude towards individual identity when people see same-race faces, and an attitude towards broader social categories and stereotypes when viewing different-race faces. A 2020 study by Golijeh Golarai and colleagues found that racially-biased face processing is present in children as young as 7 and increases with age into adolescence and adulthood.

Racial bias in the brain extends beyond the perception of physical features. fMRI research by Yuan Cao and colleagues in 2015 demonstrates that brain activity related to empathy is higher when people view a painful scenario involving an actor of their same race compared to an actor of a different race. Importantly, participants who reported more regular contact with different-race individuals showed stronger empathy responses to pain in different-race actors.

These biased brain processes can have major implications on behaviour and decisions. For example, a 2012 study by Harrison Korn and colleagues showed that brain activity demonstrating more anti-Black or pro-white bias was correlated with providing less damage compensation in a hypothetical employment discrimination case. Awareness of biases and intentional implementation of strategies to reduce them is key to building an equitable society.

Brain-based strategies for reducing and counteracting unconscious bias

Accept that your brain is biased

It’s tough to admit that you’re biased - we all are. But it’s a necessary first step. Keep in mind that bias comes from a brain wired for shortcuts that’s fed biased learning over time and across all aspects of our lives - it doesn’t come from an individual being a “bad person.” 

While we may not have consciously chosen to be biased, it’s crucial that we all actively work towards reducing and counteracting bias. Learning about the neural basis of bias can help us understand its presence in all of us and rebuild our brain’s approach to the concept of bias. Many of us have previously learned to associate the concept of bias with “bad people” - instead, let’s work towards associating bias with everyone, accountability, and a need for action.

Broaden your learning

Engage your brain in meaningful connections with people who have diverse identities, perspectives, and experiences. Seek out content from a variety of sources and creators with identities, ideas, and backgrounds that are different from yours. If you’re an educator or content creator, ensure diverse identities are represented in your communications to promote unbiased learning for your community.

Be open and curious, ask questions, and get to know people on an individual level: How do they spend their time? What drives them? What are their goals and strengths? Where do you share similarities with them, and what makes them unique? 

Individualized connections help expand the associations in your brain between characteristics (e.g., jobs, accomplishments, education, skills, hobbies, personalities) and people of all identities. Expanding associations, particularly when they include counter-stereotypical connections, reduces the likelihood of the brain jumping to one stereotypical connection during unconscious processing.

Add structure

Awareness and learning at the individual level are not, on their own, sufficient to reduce bias - they don’t change the fact that our brains are wired to be biased. Changes in organizational practices are needed in order to create meaningful impacts. Reduce the opportunity for biased brain shortcuts by adding structure to organizational processes such as evaluations and interactions. 

For example, prepare a list of questions in advance of job interviews and ensure that all candidates for the same position are asked the same questions. This prevents interviewers from asking questions based on biases arising from candidates’ individual traits. Other ways to add structure include:

• Following turn-taking procedures during meetings to prevent bias-driven interruptions and idea misattribution. 

• Starting a networking event with an activity (e.g., speed networking) to help counteract bias in choice of conversation groups.

• Implementing a rotation procedure for organizational tasks such as social event organization and meeting leadership to ensure equitable distribution of opportunity and responsibility (and prevent bias-driven associations between identities and certain tasks).

Let’s create spaces where all brains can thrive

Ready to bring brain-based bias reduction to your organization? Get in touch to discover how we can work together. Stay tuned to my blog for more research and resources on the neuroscience of inclusion.