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Prejudice is one of the causes of human bias. Prejudice is a “pre-judgement,” meaning having a feeling or attitude about someone without any knowledge or basis. Prejudice is not simply feeling hatred, disgust, or hostility towards someone or a group; it can also be a small difference in positive feelings for one group versus another. It can be seen as the “emotional” component of bias.

Macroagressions describe when prejudice and other manifestations of bias are enacted by the institutions, structures, and systems of a society, as opposed to being between individuals.

Microaggressions are brief, commonplace, everyday statements or actions that are expressions of objectification, prejudice, stereotypes, and denial of identity against members of a marginalized group such as a racial or ethnic minority. “Micro” does not mean small or subtle; microaggressions can range from very small and subtle to obvious and explicit. “Micro” means referring to bias that occurs at the everyday, individual or interpersonal level.

Sometimes we are aware that we are acting or thinking with bias and sometimes we are not aware. Implicit bias is a concept that describes when we may not be fully consiously aware of our biases towards or against a specific social group. The Office of Healthcare Equity does not emphasize implicit bias in our trainings because at times it can oversimplify the complex causes of bias, function as a justification for bias, and make it harder to change biased behavior.

A bias incident is any incident in which one feels that an individual within our UW Medicine community was treated differently based on their identities, and this experience could produce harm.  Bias incidents can include experiences of racial bias/racism, sexism, gender bias, ableism, or other actions, behaviors, or processes that do not reflect the values of inclusion and equity expected in our community. 

The term “bias” has many, broad uses in our society. Statistically speaking, a bias may be defined as a systematic inaccuracy , with different causes in different contexts (e.g., a scale may be biased). Human bias is when we are systematically inaccurate in our thinking, feelings and attitudes, behavior, and things we produce. We may be biased towards or against different social identity groups, such as race, gender, or religion. This produces unfairness and injustice.