It's the perfect time to stop our unconscious bias going viral

When behavioural scientist Dr Pragya Agarwal moved from Delhi to York more than 20 years ago, her first priority was to blend in. As a single parent, a woman of colour and an academic, she worked hard to “water down” the things that made her different from those around her. Yet the more she tried to fit in, the more Agarwal began to ask herself why humans appear programmed to create “in groups” and distrust those on the outside.

“Unconscious bias has become a buzzword in recent years,” explains Agarwal. “We are all biased and, though some biases can be harmless, many aren’t.” These are the issues she unravels in her book Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias, and she confronts some uncomfortable truths along the way.

Agarwal argues that humans aren’t naturally rational creatures, and with our brains constantly bombarded with information, we rely on cognitive short cuts: patterns of learned thinking based on what has worked for us in the past, the messages we receive from others and our evolutionary programming. “Cognitive short cuts evolved to help us survive,” she says. “The problem is that we still have these responses and they don’t work well in the modern world.”

In our tribal past, the consequences of wrongly assuming that an outsider was peaceful or free from disease could be so damaging that being overcautious became a human evolutionary strategy. The result is the tendency to generalise: speedily assigning those around us to groups based on race, academic status, social class or gender and ignoring details that contradict our existing beliefs. Once we’ve placed a person in a box, Agarwal suggests we are more inclined to choose the dehumanising and dangerous approach of treating them according to the stereotypes we associate with that box rather than as an individual. It’s an experience the author has had herself.

“About 18 months ago my daughter wasn’t well,” she says. “I could feel something was terribly wrong, but medical staff thought I was over-reacting.” After creating a “scene” and insisting her child was admitted to hospital, the toddler went into septic shock.

With research showing that women are less likely to be taken seriously by health professionals and that people from minority ethnic communities face prejudice within healthcare systems, Agarwal believes the dismissive way she was treated was unconscious bias in action. In Sway she gives wide-ranging examples of other groups who face negative consequences of bias, from professional Asian footballers who struggle to be taken seriously to female musicians who are less likely to gain orchestral positions if their gender is known.

Agarwal’s motivation is personal as well as academic. As the eldest of three sisters growing up in India, she was very aware of gender bias. “Before my youngest sister was born, everybody hoped the baby would be a boy. A third daughter was seen as a huge burden and the hospital staff were disappointed for my parents and were shocked when my father celebrated her birth anyway.”

Despite or because of this inequality, Agarwal grew up conscious of women’s rights. Her upbringing wasn’t entirely conventional: her parents never prepared their daughters for marriage and they didn’t learn to cook or do domestic chores. “They let us spread our wings in a world that was not designed for women.” Nevertheless her parents worried about Agarwal’s outspoken behaviour in public as a young girl, concerned she might “be attacked or raped” because of the way she would speak up for others – even to adult men.

Though she describes them as feeling “conflicted” about whether to insist their daughters conformed to some social norms, Agarwal’s parents invested heavily in the siblings’ financial independence and insisted each pursue professional career paths to ensure they never needed to rely on a man for money.

Now a parent to her own three daughters, Agarwal has become determined to go further and help create a fairer world for her children. “We can go some way to controlling explicit prejudice,” she explains, pointing to laws against hate crime and speech and a growing awareness of explicit racism, sexism and homophobia. Yet it’s the subtle and subversive ways that bias creeps into society that worry Agarwal the most.

“Digital voice assistants are often narrated by women,” she says. This flows from and then reinforces stereotypes around the subservient role of women. Facial recognition software is, studies have shown, inherently racist and as technology learns from ongoing interactions, bias is reinforced in a feedback loop. “We can’t see technology as a panacea,” she insists. “There is a systemic and structural problem. The data being used is biased and a lack of diversity in teams means that technology hasn’t considered all our diverse parameters.”

Bias also plays out in times when we feel more afraid, threatened and stressed, she observes. Even if we don’t believe a stereotype, she says, we can still internalise it. When these stereotypes are spread in words and images they become contagious and reinforced by the wider subconscious as biases. “It is an extraordinary time,” she reflects. “The idea of an ‘in group’ and an ‘out group’ has always existed, but it is being heightened by the way it is used politically, with advertising and political campaigns relying on our desire to belong to a group and our fear of anything outside it.” She points out that with the world locked down, our echo chambers are likely to be more influential than ever.

Agarwal is not entirely pessimistic, but she is realistic. “In times of crisis our biases are strengthened,” she insists, pointing to how quickly President Trump labelled Covid-19 a “Chinese virus”. She sets out how the “horn effect” (a type of cognitive bias that taints our entire view of a person or community based on one negative aspect) allowed this comment to spread with the vigour of the virus itself, prompting direct acts of racism against Asian communities.

At least, she argues, we are finally in a place to have an honest conversation about bias. “The walls we have been putting up recently are not conducive to a harmonious society and though, through history, liberal views have always come under threat, that doesn’t mean people aren’t listening.” Agarwal feels certain that the challenge we are now facing will shine a light on the inequalities in our societies and she hopes that a small silver lining of this international emergency will be its role as a catalyst for long-term change. “If we protect the most marginalised people in society right now, it could have positive consequences for the entire population. Learning that lesson today could alter the way we tackle injustice.”

In the meantime, Agarwal encourages us to consider our own privilege; acknowledge and actively notice our own biases, particularly if we are parents or role models for young people. “Nobody wants to think that they are biased, but we all are and once we start acknowledging that we can do something about it.” She suggests that we take stock of whether our friends look, sound and are from the same background as us and that we “step outside our comfort zones and connect with others who aren’t like us.”

Though bias is often unconscious, she believes we all need to proactively educate ourselves. “Just saying that something is unconscious doesn’t absolve us of responsibility. We must think about why we have these learned behaviours and where the messages come from,” she says. And in this usually frenetic world she encourages us to take time to activate the rational side of our brains when making important decisions, as snap judgments tend to rely on our implicit biases.

She cites one study that shows how when nurses were asked to imagine how much pain a patient was in, they overcame bias and prescribed adequate pain relief. Developing empathy for others is, she says, the main way we are going to counteract these biases. “By placing ourselves in another context we shift our viewpoint. We can’t do this without putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes.” Surely there has never been a better time to do so.

Sway: Unravelling Unconscious Bias by Pragya Agarwal (Bloomsbury Sigma, £16.99) is available for £14.27 at guardianbookshop.com