Implicit Bias

Implicit bias is apart of everyone and every business whether you believe it or not. It simply is the attitudes and stereotypes that we have that effect our decision making (OSU.edu). This can be showed in a business perspective when hiring managers interview candidates for a position. This could potentially impact the reliability of a hiring process because hiring managers could be unaware of their implicit bias and use that to hire candidates that they favor over others that may be more qualified for the job. To test out my implicit bias I took the Harvard University’s Project Implicit website to test out my implicit bias on age. Going into this test I felt pretty comfortable that I have no bias towards older people or younger people. I was then tested with images of people who looked young and people who looked old. To measure my bias, the test then put the old people and the term “bad” on one side and young people and “good” on another. It measured my reaction times for these images and then did the same thing but flipped the words good and bad. Looking at the results from the test, it measured that I have no bias towards older people vs younger people. These results didn’t surprise me because I already thought that I didn’t have any bias towards age going into the test. I would imagine that if I took more of these tests for other categories then more of my implicit bias would show. Going back to how this affects the decision process in hiring, I think that hiring managers should recognize that this is a real thing and also recognize what biases they tend to lean too. This would be an advantage for a company because this would reduce the amount of variance in hiring, especially if you have multiple hiring managers that all bring in different implicit biases to interviews.

References:

Authors The Kirwan Institute. (n.d.). Understanding implicit bias. Understanding Implicit Bias | Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Retrieved May 1, 2022, from https://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/article/understanding-implicit-bias