Week One: Post 2: What is Unconscious Bias?

 In medicine, doctors have to work with people and asses them every day. They have to ask questions and gain information from their life to be able to give them proper treatment. However, a doctor can be negatively influenced by unconscious bias. This is a very dangerous thing, as it can cause the prevention of proper care of a patient. Unconscious bias is the misinterpretations you make of a person based on appearances, mannerisms, or first impressions. It is a surface-level judgment of a person based on past information, fair or unfair, that you have retained or internalized. We are unaware of these biases, but they are there in everyone. Humans assess what is safe or not safe on a gut reaction, and not safe usually falls into what is different. To increase the speed of thinking, our brains often use previous associations. Previous association is the association your brain makes with something due to a previous experience, whether it's something you heard about the topic or a first impression. Everyone uses it (whether they know it or not) because it's the easiest way for your brain to determine what is safe or unsafe. However, previous association when based on little or surface information is usually not accurate and can be unfair or prejudiced. There are many types of unconscious bias. Some examples are stereotyping, affinity bias (which is wanting to work with people just like you), conformation bias ( when you make a hypothesis and ignore information that contradicts it), and groupthink (when you change your opinions to match your groups). 

    These biases are present in every working space, but they can be the most dangerous in medical zones. Affinity bias causes employers in a medical hospital to hire people like them. But in a medical situation, your patient may not be exactly like you, be it in their race, gender, sexuality, and more. If a doctor is uncomfortable or unfamiliar with a patient, the patient may not receive proper treatment. Unconscious bias can also cause a doctor to reject a patient's symptoms, blaming it on one of their characteristics or misdiagnosing them. Unconscious bias can cause people to be hurt, and it needs to be fixed. 

StanfordOnline CME.20775Unconscious Bias in Medicine

Course directors and authors:

Yvonne (Bonnie) Maldonado, MD

Magali Fassiotto, PhD

Faculty and authors:

Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP

Rebecca Adler, M.Ad.Ed.