Using the Tools of Mindfulness and Compassion to Unravel our Unconscious Biases

As Eddie Glaude Junior, distinguished professor of African American studies at Princeton University recently said, “We have to face who we are. This is the problem. We keep sticking our heads in the sand. We don’t believe who we are.”  So, friends…This, if we choose to accept it, is our spiritual work: being willing to face and see clearly where we get stuck in our personal lives and as a society.

We are at a tremendous crossroads in this moment. Where we go as individuals and as a society, depends deeply on not only connecting to what matters most, but also upon honestly investigating and accepting the ways in which our own actions contribute to and perpetuate harm.

Although there is certainly a great deal of work required to repair what is broken in our society, our capacity to step up and participate in the healing of our world is directly related to our ability to attend to the hurt and conflict within ourselves. We do this by practicing mindfulness and self-compassion.

In his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate, psychologist and founder of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman shed light on the concept of unconscious bias, but what exactly is unconscious bias and how does it affect our behaviors and decisions?

When I say Unconscious Bias what do I mean?  Simply put…Unconscious bias is defined as automatically categorizing people, places and things without being aware of it.

Unconscious biases are formed by many factors including socialization, our personal experiences and representations of different groups in the media. These impressions and experiences act as filters in which we make assessments and judgments of people around us and seek to categorize them. In her article “Understanding Unconscious Bias and Unintentional Racism”, Jean Moule tells us that human beings have a natural tendency to place individuals into certain categories that are often based on visual cues, such as gender, cultural background, body type, religious affiliations, ethnic identities, political associations and job roles, to name a few.

The unconscious brain uses associations based on social categories to develop biases. For example, if we are constantly exposed to women as primary school teachers or receptionists or men as executives then these associations become wired within the human brain.

One specific bias is called the “affinity bias”.  Many of you may already be familiar with this bias. This refers to our tendency to make unconscious judgments, in a positive way, about people who are similar to us, or we feel a connection with.  When we feel a connection with people, that directly affects the way we listen, as well as, how attentive and friendly we are.  An example of this bias would be when you automatically like someone you meet at a party when you discover that they speak Dutch because you had a Dutch grandma that you loved dearly.  So, in other words your previous association of warm feelings for all things Dutch because of your love of your grandma, predisposes you to be more likely to see this new person in a favorable light.  

What makes this unconscious is that you aren’t consciously making this assessment by directly processing how much you love your grandma, you are simply tapping into the part of your associative brain that has good feelings and this is directly affecting the way you perceive this person and therefore how you react to this person.  This is happening all the time…for all of us with everyone we meet. 

This is why it’s so important to understand unconscious bias – because it directly affects the decisions we make and the actions we take.

As the Buddha says: “What we think we become.”  What we are unconsciously thinking, we unintentionally act upon.    Because these biases are buried deep in our unconscious, we cannot readily bring mindfulness to them.  However, this is where we can choose to “wake up.”  We can notice the smoke, if the bias is the proverbial fire.  You ask, “Ok, what is the smoke I’m supposed to be mindful of?”

The smoke we wake up to consists of the micro behaviors that result from our acting upon on our unconscious biases.   The term ‘micro-behaviors’ was coined by psychologist Mary Rowe in the early 1970s, and refers to the ways in which individuals may be singled out, overlooked or ignored based on an unchangeable characteristic such as race or gender. Micro behaviors are tiny, often unconscious gestures, facial expressions, postures, words and tone of voice which can influence how included, or excluded, the people around us feel. 

Some examples of positive micro behaviors include being more willing to help somebody with whom you have a connection, being friendlier to someone you feel familiar with, and purposely sharing eye contact with someone while conversing to convey obvious interest. Examples of negative micro behaviors include checking emails on your phone while engaging with someone, or being more apt to disagree, or cut someone off while in conversation. The key here is that you are acting from an unconscious negative perception that you have about the person. 

One thing I want to make very clear — we all have biases. Whether we’re male or female, Asian, Jewish, Hindu, transgender, cis gender, with or without disabilities, we all have preconceived notions and make stereotypical judgments about people. In fact, by the age of five most of us have definite entrenched stereotypes about most social groups.  5…5!  I can’t even remember what it was like to be 5! These biases are totally normal and a part of our human evolution – they exist to help us make sense of the world.  They are not, inherently, problematic.  They can become problematic, however, when we lose our awareness of them and allow them to dictate our behaviors in ways that cause harm. 

Its critically important to accept that we all harbor biases. Why?  Because accepting and embracing this fact is a critical component of shifting out of the patterns that are keeping us stuck in our unconscious biases.  It’s just as Eddie Glaude Jr. said…  “We have to face who we are. This is the problem. We keep sticking our heads in the sand. We don’t believe who we are.”  

Embedded in our acceptance of our biases is acknowledging and understanding how we all develop as children. As children, we constantly evaluated and assessed our environments to determine our level of safety.  That assessment, accurate or not, formed the foundation of many of our beliefs that helped us make sense of our world. Our background and our experiences directly influenced our judgments of, and responses, to other people.

For example, if we didn’t see women holding positions of power, we may have concluded that men were smarter than women. Or, if we saw few, if any, Asian children at school, we may have judged that they were different.  Again, we were just trying to make sense of our world.

We were young and we didn’t have the cognitive ability to evaluate the validity of our assumptions or conclusions.  And no matter how progressive our parents might have been, as soon as we walked out the door, we had to confront a myriad of other influences vying for real-estate in our consciousness – peer pressure, the media and the social structure that promoted these stereotypes. 

As a result, the biases and conclusions that we formed as children became hard wired in our neural networks, dictating our thoughts about, and steering our automatic behavior toward, certain groups of people.  Once something is hardwired in our brains and placed in our associative memories, every time we have an experience that is similar, we strengthen the neural network in our brains that support that belief.  Remember: A belief is just a thought we no longer question.  

Mindfulness can wake us up to the smoke of our micro behaviors that comes from the fire of our unconscious biases.  Then compassion can help us shift out of the patterns that keep us stuck.  Let me break that down — when we first begin to evaluate ourselves honestly, many of us feel ashamed. Recognizing our biases is difficult.  We don’t want to think of ourselves as bad people. What we want to believe is that we are always objective and fair.  When we are faced with our own biases and the subsequent harm we have caused, however unintentional, we are uncomfortable and so we try to deny it.  Perhaps we get defensive, or angry.  Or perhaps we accept it and engage in self-loathing – we then judge ourselves and feel remorse, shame, or guilt. This is where we get stuck.  

We see the harm but we don’t want to feel what it’s like to be someone who creates harm. But we can’t deny it and so we feel badly.  We judge ourselves.   Then we get stuck in judgment. Enter Mindfulness – we wake up to when we are judging ourselves for our behavior and we see this judgment for what it ultimately is…just a distraction.  When we judge ourselves, that energy and action keep us looping in the same cycle of feeling bad and we never shift to actually doing something to address our behavior. What’s important to recognize here is that judging ourselves is one of our brain’s natural default responses to pain.  We will continue to do this unless we consciously intervene and shift the track, so to speak.  So how do we shift the track and what do we shift to?  We use Mindfulness to wake up to our negative judgment, and we shift to practicing compassion.

Instead of feeling badly, we recognize our own suffering and how bad it feels when we harm someone else.  At that point, we intervene.  First, we practice self -forgiveness, by reminding ourselves that this is not our fault, that we were all wired this way as children, and many of our biases were simply the result of the environment in which we grew up.  Then we offer ourselves self-compassion and acknowledge our own suffering.  This creates the space we need to move forward so we can start challenging some of these underlying assumptions and unconscious biases.  It takes us out of an emotional space and into a space in which we can think critically.  If we stay in a state of judgment, then judgment becomes the glue that binds us to the very thing we are judging. 

Now, the good news is that we have the power to change our minds. We have the capacity to choose how we respond to people who don’t look like us, or speak like us etc…  Instead of reacting automatically, based on hardwired stereotypes, we can pause; feel our discomfort; respond compassionately to our own suffering and then challenge our beliefs.  Every time we interrupt our automatic reaction to a person that isn’t like us in some way and we choose a different response, we are actually rewiring our neural networks.

To summarize: to begin the process of unraveling ourselves from our unconscious biases: 

1. We must awaken to our own unconscious biases and recognize them so that we know we’re dealing with, after our mindfulness alerts us to our micro behaviors.

2. Then we acknowledge the fact that we have biases simply because we are human beings.  We accept our own humanity. Instead of judging ourselves, and heaping on the guilt and/or shame that we’re not the people we thought we were, we accept ourselves as normal human beings.  Because the truth of the matter is, feeling bad about things just keeps us from taking meaningful action to change these things.  So, we make the conscious decision to stay with feeling uncomfortable with the fact that we are not the people that we want to be in that moment.  We accept our own humanity.

3. When faced with our own discomfort, in order to avoid the rabbit hole of judgment we purposely practice self-compassion and acknowledge our own suffering.  We might do this through words, by saying something to ourselves like…” It’s really hard to admit that I’m not who I want to be in this moment…or…It hurts being a human being that makes mistakes and inadvertently hurts others.” We might do this through touch – a simple placement of a hand on our own heart, or some other physical expression acknowledging our pain and suffering.  As soon as we meet our own suffering in a real and meaningful way, our judgment softens.  We meet our own needs to be seen and heard and we begin to break free from the emotional merry go round of …” I’m such a terrible person.”

4. Finally, once we’re no longer in resistance to how we really are, and we’ve created some space around it, we can then lean in and become curious about it. We have more access to critical thinking skills to investigate and challenge our beliefs, in order to determine if they are still serving us, or whether we want to let them go.  We can clearly see where we go when we’re uncomfortable.  I ask you – where do you go? To the pantry or the fridge? To the television? To the computer?  Maybe it’s not a physical place.  Maybe it’s a mental state, maybe it’s worry or planning or blaming etc. . . . 

We all have unconscious biases. It’s simply part of the process of being a human being and the way our brains are organized. That does not mean that every thought we have is right or true.  In order to see ourselves clearly and uncover the unconscious biases that affect our decisions and our actions, potentially harming ourselves and others, we have to be willing to do two things: First, be present and look at the things about ourselves that we don’t want to look at, and second, to stay with the discomfort that we feel when we see things that we don’t like about ourselves. Only then can we understand ourselves and face ourselves and others with compassion.  

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

Moule, Jean. “Understanding Unconscious Bias and Unintentional Racism.” PDK International Volume: 90 issue: 5 (January 2009): 320-326