Confronting Unconscious Bias

The Unconscious Bias Project opens up a complementary perspective on diversity and asks how prejudices and assumptions about people and groups come about, how we can reflect on them, and what we can do to mitigate their effects.

Lecture Series

Everyday bias

Unconscious biases are part of all human perception and judgment processes. They allow us to resort to "cognitive shortcuts" in everyday life and thus simplify numerous situations in which we need to process social information quickly. This helps our ability to act, but also makes our judgment prone to error.

Many different biases have been described, some of which can lead to the systematic disadvantage of individuals and groups. These include, for example, the well-known affinity bias, which leads members of selection committees to prefer applicants according to unconsciously perceived similarities. Unconscious bias can thus weaken the principle of merit-based selection.

Dealing with unconscious bias means critically questioning processes of perception and judgment and making them less prone to error. To this end, the Ruhr University is creating spaces for discussion and further training opportunities, and providing information material and suggestions for exchange.

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