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Confirmation Bias is one thing that managers and leaders need to bring more awareness to around, both in their work and personal lives.
[ Confirmation bias: the tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs. ]
While everyone is reminiscing the year that has gone by and pondering what the next year should look like, there is one thing that managers and leaders need to bring more awareness to: confirmation bias and the need for more awareness around it.
Your mind constantly seeks proof that will confirm your beliefs. That is why it’s important to be aware of your beliefs and set yourself up for success. This awareness can play a positive role in a managers’ life. This applies a lot to the way they perceive their team members.
The best description I have come across is on britannica.com.: Confirmation bias is the tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs.
This biased approach to decision-making is largely unintentional and often results in ignoring inconsistent information.
This happens quite often at the workplace, where people look for evidence that confirms what they already think is true.
For e.g. A manager may like someone in their team and will then only look for information that supports their liking or may not like a person and then constantly look for things that confirms that belief. They then start putting evidence to it, and this then extends to building stereotypes and using personal biases when assessing information.
We have come across examples of such bias across industries. A chef is expected to be large bodied, women in high paying jobs to be aggressive, men not to be caregivers, so on and so forth.
This happens because humans are constantly looking for evidence that confirms what you already think is true, rather than considering all the evidence available. Relying on stereotypes or personal biases when assessing information can lead to affecting people in the wrong way.
How can a manager stop confirmation bias from happening:
Confirmation bias can lead people to make poor decisions because it distorts the reality from which we draw evidence. Hence, as leaders and managers, it is our duty to constantly self-evaluate and self-check our ideas and thoughts.
Build awareness towards this and set yourself up for success in 2023.
Image source: Syda Productions, free and edited on CanvaPro
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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