On the morning of July 18th, we had another one of our classes with Elisha Manandhar. In the class, we talked about implicit biases which are basically unconscious biases. In our daily lives, we are unknowingly making biases without even realizing which makes it an implicit bias. Implicit bias has an impact on our daily lives since we are automatically and unknowingly making decisions in our head, such as picking one race over another without even being aware since our minds do it so quickly.
Implicit biases can have many characteristics such as age, race, ethnicity, appearance, and more. What is even more interesting is how quickly our minds can make a bias, it’s so quick that we don’t even realize that we are making a bias. Thanks to Elisha Manandhar, we were able to learn about implicit biases with videos and simple activities such as how our friends would describe us to people that we don’t know and how strangers would describe us to somebody else. At the end of these activities, we were able to compare what we wrote for friends vs strangers, we were able to conclude that our friends would know us more and would be a lot more knowledgeable about ourselves than a random stranger at the grocery store or streets.
We also learned about implicit biases by watching a video that described implicit bias characteristics with fog. The video gave an example by saying “it’s like we have been living in a fog which makes us have an implicit bias on what we see on social media, a person’s physical characteristics and more”. Although implicit biases can depend on physical characteristics, they can also depend on what you know about a person. For example, if you are a football player and you meet someone else who plays football and someone else who plays baseball your mind would immediately make a choice that you would talk to the football player since you would have more in common than the baseball player. In conclusion, implicit biases are our minds making choices based on the person’s physical characteristics, what we see on social media, what we hear from other people, or traits without us realizing that we are making biases.