What are unconscious bias and cultural bias?

An unconscious bias happens when you make a decision subconsciously based on underlying stereotypes, beliefs and attitudes. Also called implicit bias, this behaviour can cause you to favour certain people and discriminate against others without realising it. Even though you don’t realise you’re showing bias, it’s still potentially harmful and something employers can benefit from avoiding.

There are, however, some key differences between unconscious bias and cultural bias. 

How is cultural bias different?

Cultural bias involves evaluating a candidate based on characteristics like:

• cultural beliefs
• ethnicity
• religion
• age
• gender
• gender expression
• body type
• primary language
• accent
• speech difference
• emotional expression
• sexuality
• pregnancy status
• marital status
• other background characteristics.

This means a recruiter is evaluating a candidate based on culturally held stereotypes, rather than on their competencies, skills, qualifications and experience which would make them a suitable fit for a role and its responsibilities. Cultural bias usually arrives through valuing cultural standards that involve viewing some characteristics as inherently superior over others. This can often make it a form of discrimination, according to the UK’s Equality Act 2010. 

While cultural bias can be a consciously-held stereotype or belief, it can also be a form of unconscious bias. However, it is conscious if someone explicitly values their own cultural standards of those of others. This means that cultural bias can be either implicit or explicit.

Sometimes cultural bias can be systemic within a company’s own culture, or a country. This can happen if valuing some cultural standards of others is encouraged and reinforced by social, economic and political systems. Therefore, it is often up to employers to consider how cultural bias may have an influence over recruiter decisions at large. 

The impact of unconscious bias in the workplace

In Indeed’s guide to unconscious bias training, we explain that 36% of UK adults experience some form of discrimination. This can be due to a bias, either implicit or explicit, on the basis of age, disability gender, religion, sexual identity and ethnicity. 

The impact of unconscious bias in the workplace can be greatly felt by candidates and employees alike. It can emerge during the recruitment process but also affect an employer’s decisions with employees, such as who gets to work on a special project or how employers treat certain workers.

Unconscious bias often causes people to make snap decisions that aren’t based on evidence, which can be wrong decisions. It could hurt the diversity, equality and inclusion that employers want to achieve in the workplace. If your employees or job candidates identify any unconscious bias, it can create a negative work environment or damage a company’s reputation.

How employers can tackle unconscious bias

According to our guide to authentic diversity and inclusion, we discovered that true DE&I initiatives require great leadership. Therefore, inclusive attitudes may filter through the organisation when they come from the top. Employers who work hard to remove cultural bias and unconscious bias and learn about it themselves can help demonstrate the attitudes they want to see from their employees – as role models.

Bias in the hiring process

Bias can also show up in decisions made during the recruiting process. In our guide to how bias affects your recruiting efforts, we found that social biases such as unconscious bias can affect selection decisions. In the case of unconscious bias, recruiters may not believe that they are biased for or against candidates based on their gender, race or social background, but still might do so unconsciously. 

Recruiters can also sometimes have cultural bias too. Since employers have to follow the Equality Act 2010 during the hiring process, eliminating cultural bias can help them do so. Examples of cultural bias during the hiring process include: 

• Choosing not to hire a qualified candidate because they have a foreign accent;
• Choosing to hire a candidate because they share similarities with other employees already on the team, or with the recruiter themselves;
• Choosing to hire a candidate because the recruiter thinks they are physically attractive.

Hiring for culture add vs culture fit

This means that hiring for culture fit rather than culture add might be a form of discrimination. Examples of culture add include:

• Hiring a candidate because they provide fresh contributions that help the business reach new customers;
• Hiring a candidate with a skill-set that will help the business to modernise and grow;
• Hiring a candidate because they have a different personality to other employees and could provide a new perspective on the team.

Ways employers can recognise unconscious bias

Recognising implicit bias and cultural bias is a complex task. In this next section, we’ll look at some of the different forms of cultural bias which can be unconscious, or implicit. We will also provide examples of what employers can do to avoid these types of bias.

Affinity bias

Affinity bias describes the idea that people connect with and have a preference for other people who have something in common. That might be their background, appearance, education, opinions, interests or other commonalities. Affinity bias can therefore be a form of cultural bias as it can be based on being able to identify with having cultural standards in common.

You may see this with people forming cliques with people who are similar. During the hiring process, you might fall into this trap when you look for a good company culture fit. Many people consider a culture fit someone who’s similar to everyone else. While that may give employees more to talk about and limit conflicts, it doesn’t help employers who are looking to diversify their teams.

How to avoid it: Employers can analyse the skills, experiences and backgrounds that they already have on their team. They can look at what’s missing and how they can add to the culture rather than encourage uniformity throughout the organisation.

When employers interview candidates, they can look at what they have in common with them and other current employees. They can look beyond those similarities to see what else they have that can help their company. Taking the similarities out of the equation ensures employers don’t choose someone because of those commonalities.

Conformity bias

A conformity bias is a type of peer pressure. The idea is that individuals start acting like the people they’re with, even if it goes against their beliefs, without thinking for themselves. You see it in some business meetings when everyone agrees with the ideas and opinions being shared. This can happen if the most dominant voices or senior staff members always share their opinions loudly and don’t handle it well when someone brings up a different viewpoint.

During a panel-style interview, one interviewer’s opinions might influence the others. Instead of sharing their opinions about the candidates, they agree with what the influencer says.

Conformity bias can drown out other opinions. Employers can miss out on innovative solutions because some of their employees are afraid to share their ideas. Employees can start to feel undervalued if they always have to go along with the majority or the loudest, most influential people. It can also leave employees feeling bad about the situation if they go along with something that doesn’t match their values.

How to avoid it: Build a safe, trusting environment where employees feel comfortable sharing their opinions, even if they disagree with others. Employers can instruct employees how to discuss varying opinions respectfully and negotiate to come to a consensus. They can praise people who speak up against the majority to show that they value those differing viewpoints.

When hiring new employees, start with a standardised interview process using a scoring sheet where each interviewer rates the candidates and makes notes about them. Instead of discussing opinions immediately, conduct all interviews and give all interviewers time to put their thoughts down on paper. This prevents some interviewers from swaying others to choose their favourite candidate or change their opinion on a candidate.

Confirmation bias

In confirmation bias, employers could have certain beliefs or opinions about a person, such as where they went to college or their hometown. These opinions are usually based on that employer’s particular beliefs or preferences. Once they form that early opinion, they then look for facts to confirm it and often ignore evidence that contradicts that view.

In an interview, recruiters or HR might ask leading questions to receive that confirmation. Instead of listening to the answers without bias, they only hear what they want to hear to prove that their initial assumptions are correct. Answers that disprove their conclusion might be ignored.

How to avoid it: Avoid confirmation bias during the interview process by standardising it. Ask the same questions of every candidate and prepare questions early to avoid developing ones that confirm biases. It’s natural to have follow-up conversations based on candidate answers, but keeping the interview process as standardised as possible can reduce the risk of confirmation bias.

Attribution bias

An attribution bias happens when someone makes assumptions about the reason behind a person’s behaviour, mistakes or successes. They might use previous interactions with the person, their cultural background or their behaviours as reasons to judge someone else’s behaviour.

For example, if a salesperson lands the biggest account the company has ever had, an employer might assume the person got lucky or had a personal connection that helped them get the deal. If an employee is late for work, their manager might assume they’re lazy or just don’t care. Running with such assumptions could lead to disciplinary actions or negative performance reviews. But the employee could be struggling to find childcare or dealing with an unreliable car that they can’t afford to fix.

While interviewing candidates, recruiters might make assumptions about a red flag on a CV, such as an employment gap, without knowing the full story. Or they might make assumptions about an unusual behaviour at the job interview, such as someone showing up late or acting overly nervous or insecure.

How to avoid it: Instead of making assumptions about a behaviour, whether it’s with a current employee or job candidate, stop and reassess the situation. In an interview, consider asking clarifying questions about what could be seen as red flags. For current employees, their manager could schedule a one-on-one meeting if they notice potential employee misconduct. Instead of making assumptions, ask questions about the situation before using disciplinary action.

Learning how to spot both unconscious and cultural bias can help businesses to prevent it. By removing discrimination from the workplace in this way, employees often feel happier and more secure in their job. Consider including information about your discrimination prevention measures in your internal communications as well as business policies.