Articles

One of my family's favorite pre-COVID Saturday morning rituals was to go to the Bernal Heights Farmers Market in San Francisco, CA. I can still see my wife picking up vegetables, teaching our son and daughter how to choose the best ones. We sampled fresh fruits & veggies. It was crowded but vibrant with a joyous community full of laughter. More than half a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, I miss this and other collective, community gatherings and experiences. Both love and nostalgia are central to understanding proximity bias in a pandemic. Think for a moment how proximity ...

Bias & virus and Zoom...oh my! Bias & virus and Zoom...oh my! In some ways, this pandemic experience feels like a replay of the Wizard of Oz. There are many parallels between a tornado whisking Dorothy away to a strange land called Oz and the current world we find ourselves in. While a yellow-brick road may not be readily accessible, we can start to perceive a path unfolding in front of us. Unfortunately, it’s riddled with cognitive biases that aren’t serving us well. ​ As reported in Deloitte’s 2016 article on the topic, bias in all its forms ...

The first of the five most common workplace biases is the Like-Me bias. Like-Me bias is the gravitational pull we feel towards similar people. Reflect back to your high school experience...the formative petri dish of cliques, in-crowds and outliers. It’s a perfect microcosm of the larger world, where “Like-Me” bias plays out. It’s where jocks, the cool crowd, science nerds, band and theater kids and more - all tend to group together to the exclusion of others. Like-Me bias brings people together, since common traits & interests build community … and it sets people apart, as “othering” ...

Time to look at our biases again, this time focusing on Egocentric Bias. As a quick refresher, we are making our way through the five most common cognitive biases that appear in the workplace and how to mitigate them. These biases can impact your professional and interpersonal relationships at work and impact your company’s ability to recruit and retain talent. ​ Egocentric Bias is the belief that “my view is clear and true”. And from our brain’s perspective, that makes sense. If I understand it, then it must be understandable to everyone. This bias is most prevalent ...

As we continue to look at the five most common cognitive biases in the workplace, let’s start with a brief refresher. When we think of bias, we are most often thinking of conscious bias, an intentional act in favor of, or against, one thing, person, idea or group compared with another, usually in a way that's considered to be unfair or unjustified. Unconscious bias is an unrecognized mental process or categorization that is intimately tied to how the human brain processes information. These unconscious, or cognitive biases, are design features of our brain that can become design ...