Everyday Bias Quotes

“Because we often think of bias as a function of overt acts of bigotry, we can sometimes remain blind to the invisible structures, systems, and behaviors that bestow and reinforce that power and privilege on a daily basis.”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“If You Are Human, You Are Biased Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life. —Erich Fromm, German psychologist and psychoanalyst”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“Possessing bias is part and parcel of being human. And the more we think we are immune to it, the greater the likelihood that our own biases will be invisible or unconscious to us!”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“There is an important difference between feeling guilty and taking responsibility. I once heard that guilt is what you feel because of what you did, but responsibility is what you take because of the kind of person you want to be.

The distinction between guilt and responsibility is not simply a theoretical moral or linguistic distinction. It is a distinction that quite profoundly affects the way we deal with the issue at hand. When we feel guilty we usually feel powerless. We feel violated, either by our own abandonment of our values, or because somebody else “made us feel that way.” That’s why we often attribute our guilt to others (“Why are you always making me feel guilty?”). Guilt often leads to defensiveness, anxiety, and shame, and because we feel blamed, either by others, or ourselves, it also may lead to retaliation. This is one of the reasons there is such strong white male backlash around diversity and inclusion issues. White men are reacting to being blamed and “made” to feel guilty for things they often don’t realize that they’re doing, or for privileges they don’t realize they have had for longer than any of them have been alive. I want to be clear that I’m not suggesting that there are not a lot of white men who have done things, and do things, that have harmed others. On the contrary. However, for many, these behaviors occur without people ever realizing they are engaging in the behaviors.

On the other hand, when we take responsibility for our actions, we empower ourselves. We can bring compassion to ourselves and to others for our blind spots. We are, by the very nature of the word, “able to respond” to the situation at hand. We can be motivated to grow, to develop, to improve ourselves and transform our ways of being. We have an opportunity to correct our mistakes and move forward and, we hope, improve the situation. In doing so, we can remove the “good person/bad person” stigma, and instead deal with each other as human beings, with all of us trying to figure out how to get along in this world.

Again, I want to be very clear: I am not in any way suggesting we avoid dealing with people who are overtly hostile or biased. We have to establish a zero tolerance policy for that kind of behavior. But the evidence is very clear, and it is that, overwhelmingly, most bias is unconscious. When we treat people who don’t know they are demonstrating bias in a way that suggests there is something evil about them, we not only put them on the defensive, but we also lose the ability to influence them because they have no idea what we are focused on.”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“In the introduction I mentioned a study that was conducted by Justin Wolfers and Joseph Price that revealed bias among NBA referees. In February 2014 the authors of the original study, along with Devin Pope, from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, found that simply being aware of the issue, even without any conscious action, had created significant change. The authors found that the bias continued during the three years after the initial study, but that after the study received widespread media attention in 2007 the bias virtually disappeared. While the NBA reported no specific actions taken (e.g., no discussions or changes in training or incentives for referees) the awareness and attention to the issue appear to have been enough to create significant change. Simply having it in their span of attention appears to have changed the referees’ behavior.”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“Feeling powerful seems to makes us less oriented toward risk, and more oriented toward rewards. Less oriented toward compassion, and more oriented toward selfishness. Less aware of how we got where we are, and more likely to feel like we earned it ourselves. Does that mean that people with power are not such good people?

What all of this means is that power activates certain aspects of the brain and shuts down others, creating an unconscious tendency to be more or less attentive to the needs of others around us. People in power positions may be unconsciously more susceptible to selfishness and reduced empathy, without ever realizing it. It is not the people who hold the power that are the problem. Rather, it is the impact power makes upon people.”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“All of the examples are subject to interpretation. Yet, on another level, what in life isn’t subject to interpretation? As I have been saying thus far in this book, this is the way the mind works. Something happens. We see parts of it, because our mind cannot process all of the information in front of us. We then take what we do process, filtered by our previous experience, and evaluate that particular instance based on the biases that we have developed over the course of our lives. To some degree, everything we see and experience is purely based upon interpretation.”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“It is not by accident that people in nondominant groups pick up on these subtle behaviors more quickly and clearly than people in dominant groups. When we are members of dominant groups, which, in the United States, generally means whites, men, Christians, and heterosexuals (among others), we often don’t easily see these behaviors. And we don’t need to do so. Our culture is closely aligned with the culture. When we are in nondominant groups, it is essential to notice some of these subtleties to survive on a daily basis. We learn to spot them before they make a negative impact upon us.”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“Brendan Nyhan, assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College, found that when voters are misinformed, factual information only makes them become more rigid in their point of view! Nyhan found these instances of facts making people more rigid:
-People who thought weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq believed that misinformation even more strongly when they were shown a news story correcting that belief.
-People who thought George W. Bush banned all stem cell research kept thinking he did that even after they were shown an article saying that only some federally funded stem cell work was stopped.
-People who said the economy was the most important issue to them, and who disapproved of Barack Obama’s economic record, were shown a graph of nonfarm employment over the prior year. It included a rising line that indicated about one million jobs were added. They were asked whether the number of people with jobs had gone up, down, or stayed about the same. Many, looking straight at the graph, said down.”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“In extensive research, Cuddy, Fiske, and Glick found there were some groups people tended to respond to with a low degree of both warmth and competence (e.g., welfare recipients, homeless people, poor people, and Arabs). Others we may feel a high degree of warmth toward, but not see as very competent (e.g., the elderly and people with physical or mental disabilities). Still others we may see as very competent, but not feel very much warmth toward at all (e.g., Asians, rich people, and Jews). And finally, there are those for whom we feel a high level of warmth, and a high level of competence (e.g., housewives, Christians, middle-class Americans). How we feel about each of these groups might yield very different behaviors.”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“As odd as it may seem, there also are constructive uses of biases against certain groups (Q2 in figure 1.1). They can benefit us in many ways. We determine that people who have aggressive personality types might not be the best fit for a customer service job. Or that people who don’t have certain technology skills and background won’t be a good match for a job that requires computer proficiency. If we didn’t have these filters, hiring would be almost oppressive, because we would start with a huge number of résumés and have to look at all of them more carefully than time might allow.

I know that many people would say those are “qualifications,” and that looking for qualifications is not the same as having biases. In fact, qualifications are simply biases that we have agreed upon and codified. There are hundreds of examples of people who have performed in extraordinary ways who do not have the normal qualifications for their roles. If qualifications were the only measure of success, than college dropouts such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates would still be unknown. However, understandably, we have determined that while there are occasional creative eccentrics like Jobs and Gates, it just doesn’t make good sense to look at 150 résumés and not take education into account. So we use biases against the lack of those characteristics to “filter out” certain people who we might have determined are not a good fit for the job.”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“This is an especially important question to ask at the present time, as I write this book more than six years since the start of the dramatic recession of 2008. This recession has not only devastated the world economy, but it has contributed to a regression in the very behaviors of bias I have discussed thus far. There is no real surprise here, as history has shown us time and again that economic stress creates a greater sense of threat and fear of “the other.” On a societal scale, hate crimes go up when the economy goes down. On a global scale, dictatorial and fascist regimes are almost always preceded by economic upheaval, whether it is Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain, or the Taliban in Afghanistan. These kinds of movements have almost always focused on identifying an “other” who has to be controlled, dethroned, or annihilated.”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“One of the most powerful ways we do this is by creating stereotypes. We begin to learn how to “read” different kinds of people. As we encounter them, we instantly compare them to other people we have encountered before. Were the others friendly, safe, and welcoming? If so, then we are likely to feel comfortable with these individuals. On the other hand, were the others hostile or unfriendly? Then the mind sends a different message: Be careful! Stereotypes provide a shortcut that helps us navigate through our world more quickly, more efficiently, and, our minds believe, more safely. Of course, even when we haven’t encountered a particular kind of person before, we may have the same judgments and assessments based on things that we have heard or learned about “people like that.” As far back as 1906, William Graham Sumner, the first person to hold an academic chair in sociology at Yale University, identified the phenomenon of “in-group/out-group bias.” Sumner wrote that “each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exists in its own divinities, and looks with contempt on outsiders.”[6] This phenomenon is magnified when the “in” group is the dominant or majority culture in a particular circumstance.”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“One of the most powerful ways we do this is by creating stereotypes. We begin to learn how to “read” different kinds of people. As we encounter them, we instantly compare them to other people we have encountered before. Were the others friendly, safe, and welcoming? If so, then we are likely to feel comfortable with these individuals. On the other hand, were the others hostile or unfriendly? Then the mind sends a different message: Be careful! Stereotypes provide a shortcut that helps us navigate through our world more quickly, more efficiently, and, our minds believe, more safely.”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“Our conscious motivations, ideas, and beliefs are a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices, in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance albeit false, that the whole mixture is real and true. The thinking processes attempt to organize this whole cesspool of illusions according to the laws of plausibility. This level of consciousness is supposed to reflect reality; it is the map we use for organizing our life. —Erich Fromm, German psychologist and psychoanalyst”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“Human beings are consistently, routinely, and profoundly biased. We not only are profoundly biased, but we also almost never know we are being biased. The fact that we don’t know it results in behaviors that not only include the ones described previously, but, as we’ll discuss later, have even contributed to the deaths of innocent people.”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives

“Human beings are consistently, routinely, and profoundly biased. We not only are profoundly biased, but we also almost never know we are being biased. The fact that we don’t know it results in behaviors that not only include the ones described previously, but, as we’ll”
― Howard J. Ross, Everyday Bias: Identifying and Navigating Unconscious Judgments in Our Daily Lives