Unconscious bias, also known as implicit bias, refers to the attitudes that affect our understanding, actions and decisions in an unconscious manner. These biases, which encompass both favourable and unfavourable assessments, are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control.
The funding entity is committed to ensuring that no application for funding is disadvantaged due to the impacts of unconscious bias during the peer review processes, particularly bias which disadvantages female or minority researchers.
The important aspects of unconscious biases are that they are:
- Activated involuntarily and without awareness
- Pervasive, implicit biases are part of how we behave.
Unconscious bias is notoriously difficult to address, since we can’t access our unconscious cognitive processes. However, simply being aware of these processes enables us to consider our decisions more carefully, and to reflect on whether they have been inappropriately influenced by automatic or unjustified thoughts and feelings. By slowing down the speed of our decision making and questioning the verity of cultural stereotypes, we are better able to identify instances where we have made a decision on the basis of our innate predispositions, rather than on rational analysis and substantive merit.
In order to increase our awareness of unconscious bias, we strongly encourage assessors to undertake Implicit Association Tests (IAT) prior to commencing assessments.
