Although we consciously may feel that we don’t have prejudices, the truth is that our prejudices often operate well below the level of our consciousness. Neurology has shown us that our instinctive and unconscious ‘fight or flight’ response to other groups operates around 10 times faster than our conscious mind, at about 33 thousandths of a second of we feel threatened. 

Our unconscious mind also processes around 200,000 times more information than our attentive conscious mind, so it is no wonder that it has such an influence on our behaviour. Prejudice is affecting our behaviour, and we are not even aware it is happening.

It is said that power corrupts but it seems that powerful people also handle their prejudices differently to the less powerful. Powerful people remember stereotypes better, are more likely to initiate a contact based on a stereotype and more likely to move to action quickly.

This may explain why some incredibly successful men often blurt out sexist remarks to women they have just met. High power people are also less likely to regulate and check their prejudices compared to low power people and to act to favour their own–in group. And it appears that dominant groups (white males in Western society) are more likely to exercise these prejudices of power than minority groups when in the power seat.

The research tells us that by suppressing the stereotype for groups we enhance the effect once that control, is removed. Known as the stereotype suppression or ironic rebound effect the research tells us that what people get forced not to do in the office is then even more likely to occur when they walk out of the door to make a site visit or attend a meeting. And the worrying thing is that this effect is most prevalent in people who beforehand were relatively low in prejudice; we actually make it worst among the people who are most on our side to begin with.

As organisation and society (and the law) have developed it has become less acceptable to openly voice prejudiced attitudes. Asking people to fill in a questionnaire or respond to interview questions, however clever is unlikely to elicit a prejudiced response due to a lack of self-awareness or a reluctance to disclose. Having described just how powerful and influential the unconscious is in developing and maintaining it seems logical that this unguarded and powerful basis for our prejudices may also afford access to test for our prejudices. 

The most successful test is an implicit association test which taps the unconscious with simple sorting tasks directed at the group against whom someone may have a prejudice.  It uses the differences in response times creating when someone has to assign ‘Good’ words with a group they may dislike compared to when they assign them with ‘Bad’ words. So it allows no thinking time it gives direct access to any negative associations a person may hold.

Just as we are biologically disposed to be prejudiced, so we have the neurology to stop it becoming behaviour. Most people have an alert system which triggers our regulatory processes to stop our prejudices reaching our behaviour. Scientists have noticed that when we are controlling our prejudice the brain creates a wave of signals which activates a regulatory function in the brain to override the impulse to act.  

In the real world many of us don’t also have this well developed automatic regulator. The cognitive processing power required to maintain the regulatory function, which is shared with many other mental processes, is such that when other processes use up that capacity it can fail.

For example when we are stressed, emotional or given ambiguous tasks or using alcohol our instincts are more likely to become behaviour. It seems that as organisations, as well as helping people to understand and control their prejudices, that employers might consider engineering sensitive jobs to prevent overloading the regulatory processes and to let our natural instincts block our natural prejudices.