Garissa offers opportunity to confront biases

Flags fly at half-mast at KICC on April 6, 2015 to mark three days of mourning following the deadly Garissa University College attack. PHOTO | SALATON NJAU |  NATION MEDIA GROUP

By SCOTT BELLOWS

In Summary

• The world expects Africa to sustain human misery. The media reinforces it.
• When making decisions, stop and think whether you have considered whether any bias crept in.

The tertiary education community stands in shock, dismay, and sympathy at the cowardly terrorist attacks at Garissa University College. We steadfastly unite with Kenyans to grieve the departed and look bewildered at the staggering senseless loss of life.

The attack challenged humanity’s core values of the inviolability of life and the sanctity of education. I join academics across the nation to vow to teach the affected displaced survivors who were violently ejected from their educational dreams.

As our sadness starts to harden into righteous anger, let our nation not foster unconscious bias against certain ethnicities and religions.

Unconscious bias stands in contrast to dangerous outward stereotyping as described in Business Talk on July 19, 2013. Unconscious bias exists as a more subtle evil in our midst.

Ken Norton describes unconscious bias as preconceived notions created and reinforced by our environments and experiences.

The human mind constantly processes information, oftentimes without our conscious knowledge. The faster paced our jobs and lives and the more data we lack, the more our unconscious bias fills in the gaps in our perceptions.

The bias impacts everything we do from hiring and promotion decisions to where we want to live to who we marry to the prognosis we give patients to the grades we assign. Implicit bias happens by our brains making exceptionally quick judgments and assessments of people and situations without us noticing.

Authors Banaji and Greenwald highlight that unconscious bias exists even among good honest people, not only among bigots. We may not even know our deep views and opinions or their full impact and implications on us and others.

In last week’s ‘Business Talk’ I highlighted Harvard University research from Brooks, Huang, Kearney, and Murray that investors prefer to fund entrepreneurial ventures pitched by seemingly attractive men over other individuals.

Often when researchers collect data and present it to those acting on their unconscious bias, the offending individuals become shocked and embarrassed that they could behave in such a manner and have their own biases hurt otherwise worthy people.

Over recent years, researchers Heilman and Haynes discovered how when women succeed on teams, other participants actually attribute female success to often non-professional methods even when no such evidence exists. Hebl, Bigazzi, Mannix, and Dovidio found intense discrimination among certain minorities.

Further, when good people realise their discrimination is real, they often redefine merit to justify their prejudice. An example might exist in an educational system in Kenya obsessed with KCSE scores, but substandard schools in deep rural areas whereby students must compete on uneven footing.

The US, on the other hand, takes into consideration the quality of school a student studies in when making university admission decisions rather than cutting off all students not attaining a certain grade.

The US, though, does not present itself as a good example to the world in dealing with unconscious bias as many conservatives there deny the existence of racial bias by the nation’s police forces. Even this author, a Caucasian Kenyan, when traveling in the US notices that dark skinned individuals driving getting pulled over by police in dramatically higher proportion than lighter skinned people.

Unconscious bias rears its ugly head in relation to gender, ethnicity, origin, sexuality, socio-economic status, and political affiliations, among many others.