Unconscious Bias in Public Health: Recognizing and Addressing It

This report delves into the concept of unconscious bias, focusing on its impact and potential remedies within the context of public health. The assignment examines how implicit biases, often rooted in personal experiences, stereotypes, and cultural contexts, can influence decisions and actions, particularly in healthcare settings. It references the work of Van Ryn (2016) on avoiding unintended bias and Holroyd, Scaife, and Stafford (2017) on the responsibility for implicit bias. The report highlights the potential for unconscious biases to affect interactions and outcomes in healthcare, leading to disparities and inequities. To address these challenges, the report suggests strategies such as promoting self-awareness, managing triggers, embracing change, and increasing exposure to diverse perspectives. This assignment provides valuable insights into the complexities of unconscious bias and its implications for public health professionals and researchers. The report emphasizes the importance of recognizing and mitigating biases to foster more equitable and effective healthcare practices and outcomes.

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A Critical Study on ‘Even the most open-minded person harbors a lot of unconscious bias’.

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Impact and Remedies of Unconscious Bias
According to Van Ryn (2016), Unconscious bias is deep rooted in human brain's automatic
processing systems that helps them to take decisions unconsciously. Unconscious bias is derived
from personal experiences, stereotypical thoughts and cultural context that can impact decisions
and actions taken by the human brain. The idea of unconscious bias is complex enough to
understand where exactly it is rooted. There is plethora of information available to human beings
at any given point of time, but human brain can process only few of that information to create
shortcuts and experience to make assumptions. People belief that they are ethical and unbiased
but in reality, people's self-perception is still incorrect.
People can have affinity bias, perception bias, Halo effect, confirmation bias and group
perception thinking. For instance, the presence of unconscious implicit bias can be present within
the personal identity of a person as people unconsciously may associate positive or negative
traits based upon the race, gender or caste of a person. Social psychologists have coined Implicit
Association Tests to confirm the hypothesis of presence of unconscious bias in human brains.
As opined by Holroyd, Scaife and Stafford (2017), the effect of implicit bias can widely be seen
in the society, behavior of people, educational institutions, workplaces and legal systems. This
bias can lead to implicitly racist behavior, harmful stereotypes and prejudices impacting
mentality, behavior and acceptability of people belonging to different race, caste and culture.
Therefore, people must practice personal self-awareness, work on their triggers, stop resisting to
change, increase exposure to biases and treat everyone equally rather than presenting biased
nature towards them.

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Reference List
Holroyd, J., Scaife, R. and Stafford, T., 2017. Responsibility for implicit bias. Philosophy
Compass, 12(3), p.e12410.
Van Ryn, M., 2016. Avoiding unintended bias: strategies for providing more equitable health
care. Minnesota medicine, 99(2), p.40.