We all like to think we’re fair. We treat everyone equally, judge people on merit, and make decisions based on facts. Right?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: your brain is running programs you didn’t install. These programs, shaped by everything from childhood experiences to last week’s news headlines, influence your choices in ways you don’t even notice. They’re quick. Automatic. And yes, they affect your decisions about people.
The good news? Once you know what to look for, you can start to catch these patterns. That’s where honest self-reflection comes in—the kind that might make you squirm a little but will ultimately make you better.
Questions to Ask Yourself about Unconscious Bias
These questions aren’t designed to make you feel guilty. They’re tools for getting real with yourself about how bias shows up in your daily life, your work, and your relationships.
1. Who Do I Automatically Trust?
Think about the last time you met someone new in a professional setting. Did you immediately assume they were competent, or did you wait to be convinced? Your answer probably varied depending on who that person was.
We give certain people the benefit of the doubt before they’ve earned it. Maybe it’s someone who went to your alma mater, shares your accent, or dresses in a way that signals “success” to you. Meanwhile, others have to prove themselves first. This happens in hiring decisions, team assignments, and everyday interactions. Pay attention to who gets your automatic trust and who doesn’t—the pattern matters.
2. Whose Ideas Get My Immediate Attention?
Picture your last team meeting. When different people spoke up, did you lean in equally for all of them? Studies show that identical ideas get rated higher when they come from certain demographics. You might think you’re immune to this, but our brains are lazy. They take shortcuts.
If you find yourself mentally checking out when some colleagues speak but perking up for others, that’s your unconscious bias talking. It’s worth asking why—because good ideas don’t discriminate, even if your attention sometimes does.
3. What Assumptions Am I Making About Someone’s Background?
You see someone’s name on a resume or meet them at a conference. Your brain starts filling in blanks before you have real information. This person probably grew up like this, studied that, and has these interests. But where are those assumptions coming from?
Often, they’re based on superficial characteristics. You might assume someone with a certain accent didn’t attend university locally. Or that a colleague with kids isn’t interested in demanding projects. These mental shortcuts feel harmless, even efficient. They’re neither. They cloud your judgment and close off possibilities before you’ve given people a fair shot.
4. Do I Expect Different People to Prove Their Competence Differently?
Here’s a sneaky one. You might hold everyone to “high standards,” but are those standards actually the same? Research shows we often require more proof of competence from some groups than others. Someone gets hired because of their “potential,” while someone else needs a flawless track record.
Watch how you evaluate credentials, experience, and even mistakes. If you’re giving second chances to some people but not others, or if you need to see five examples of excellence from one person but only two from another, your bias is showing.
5. Who Makes Me Feel Comfortable, and Why?
Comfort is a powerful force. We gravitate toward people who feel familiar, who remind us of ourselves or people we already like. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying someone’s company. The problem starts when comfort becomes a criterion for opportunity.
If you consistently choose to mentor, promote, or collaborate with people who make you comfortable, you’re probably reproducing your own demographic profile. Real inclusion means getting comfortable with being uncomfortable sometimes. It means working well with people whose communication styles, humor, or way of seeing things differs from yours.
6. What Stories Do I Tell Myself About Different Groups?
Your brain loves a good narrative. Men are assertive, women are emotional. Young people are tech-savvy, older workers are set in their ways. Certain neighborhoods produce ambitious people, others don’t. These stories feel like observations, but they’re actually stereotypes dressed up as insight.
The dangerous part? Once you have the story, your brain looks for evidence that confirms it. That’s called confirmation bias, and it works hand-in-hand with unconscious bias to keep your worldview narrow. Challenge the stories. Ask yourself where they came from and whether they’d hold up under scrutiny.
7. How Do I React to Being Challenged by Different People?
Someone pushes back on your idea. How you respond probably depends on who’s doing the pushing. If it’s someone you respect or see as a peer, you might engage thoughtfully. If it’s someone you’ve already discounted—even unconsciously—you might get defensive or dismissive.
This one’s hard to spot in the moment because disagreement triggers our egos. But if you notice you’re more receptive to feedback from certain people than others, and the pattern tracks along demographic lines, you’ve found a bias. The fix isn’t to accept all criticism equally. It’s to evaluate the merit of the feedback itself, not the person delivering it.
8. What Does Leadership Look Like in My Mind?
Close your eyes and picture a leader. Who did you see? If you imagined someone who looks like most of the leaders you’ve known throughout your life, that’s your mental prototype at work. The problem is that prototypes are based on historical patterns, and historical patterns often reflect historical biases.
Your mental image of leadership affects who you see as “leadership material” and who you might overlook. Maybe leadership in your mind is tall, deep-voiced, and commanding. But some of the best leaders are none of those things. They’re collaborative, quietly confident, and build consensus rather than dominating rooms. Expand your prototype, and you’ll spot talent you’ve been missing.
9. Do I Give Equal Weight to Different Communication Styles?
Some people speak up quickly and confidently. Others think before they talk. Some are direct, others are diplomatic. If you only value one style, you’re missing out on contributions from people who communicate differently.
This bias often disadvantages people from cultures where being overly assertive is considered rude. It hurts introverts who process internally before speaking. And it means you’re probably hearing the same voices over and over while others stay silent—not because they have nothing to say, but because the environment doesn’t invite their style of contribution.
10. When I Think “Cultural Fit,” What Do I Really Mean?
“Cultural fit” is one of the most abused phrases in hiring and promotion decisions. On the surface, it sounds reasonable. You want someone who’ll mesh with the team. But dig deeper, and “cultural fit” often means “someone like us.”
Someone who shares your sense of humor, your working hours preference, your weekend hobbies. The result? A homogeneous team where everyone thinks alike, which is terrible for innovation and problem-solving. Instead of cultural fit, think about cultural contribution. What does this person bring that you don’t already have?
11. Am I More Willing to Overlook Flaws in Some People Than Others?
Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has off days. But do you extend equal grace? If someone you’ve already mentally categorized as “high potential” misses a deadline, you might attribute it to circumstances. If someone you’re less sure about does the same thing, you might see it as proof they’re not up to the job.
Psychologists call this attribution bias. We attribute favorable motives to people we like and negative motives to those we don’t. Pay attention to how you explain away behavior. Are you giving everyone the same benefit of the doubt, or are you grading on a curve you didn’t even realize existed?
12. What Do I Notice First About People?
Your brain processes visual information incredibly fast. Within milliseconds of seeing someone, you’ve registered race, gender, approximate age, and attractiveness. You can’t help this—it’s automatic. What you can control is what you do next.
Do you let those first impressions solidify into judgments? Or do you consciously pause and wait for more information? The goal isn’t to stop noticing differences. That’s impossible and probably undesirable. The goal is to prevent those immediate observations from snowballing into assumptions about competence, character, or potential.
13. How Often Do I Seek Out Perspectives Different from My Own?
If everyone in your inner circle thinks like you, you’re operating in an echo chamber. This goes beyond demographics. It’s about seeking out people with different political views, life experiences, professional backgrounds, and ways of solving problems.
Surrounding yourself with sameness feels validating. But it makes you intellectually lazy and more prone to bias. When you actively seek different perspectives—and actually listen to them—you’re forcing your brain out of its comfortable shortcuts. That’s where growth happens.
14. Do I Have Double Standards for Certain Behaviors?
Assertiveness can be seen as confidence or aggression, depending on who’s displaying it. Silence in meetings might be seen as thoughtful from one person, disengaged from another. Emotional expression could be authentic or unprofessional. The behavior is the same, but your interpretation shifts.
These double standards are everywhere once you start looking. They affect performance reviews, promotion decisions, and daily interactions. The fix requires brutal honesty with yourself. If you’d react differently to the exact same behavior from two different people, you need to unpack why.
15. What Privileges Do I Take for Granted?
This question makes people uncomfortable, and understandably so. Nobody likes to think their achievements aren’t entirely earned. But privilege isn’t about diminishing your hard work. It’s about recognizing that some obstacles simply weren’t in your path.
Maybe you never had to worry about whether your name would get your resume tossed. Or whether your accent would undermine your credibility. Or whether speaking up would get you labeled as “aggressive.” These aren’t hypotheticals for everyone. Recognizing your own privileges helps you spot when others face barriers you never had to consider.
16. Am I Comfortable with People Who Don’t Fit Neat Categories?
Humans love categories. They help us organize information quickly. But real people are messy and multidimensional. Someone might not fit your mental boxes for gender presentation, career trajectory, or cultural identity. How do you react to that ambiguity?
If you find yourself uncomfortable or constantly trying to figure out “what” someone is, that discomfort is worth examining. People don’t exist to make sense to you. And the most interesting, creative, innovative people often defy easy categorization. Your discomfort with ambiguity might be costing you relationships and opportunities with exactly the people who could broaden your thinking.
17. How Do I Define “Professionalism”?
Professionalism is another one of those concepts that sounds neutral but isn’t. What counts as professional dress? Professional hair? Professional speech? Often, these standards are based on a specific cultural norm—usually the dominant one. That means people who don’t naturally conform to that norm have to code-switch, change their appearance, or mask parts of themselves to be taken seriously.
You might think you’re just maintaining standards. But if those standards have nothing to do with actual job performance and everything to do with conforming to a particular aesthetic or style, you’re enforcing bias. Real professionalism is about competence, integrity, and respect—not about whether someone’s hairstyle matches your expectations.
18. Do I Make Assumptions About People’s Interests and Goals?
You might assume the young parent on your team isn’t interested in travel opportunities. Or that the older employee is coasting toward retirement. Or that someone from a particular background would or wouldn’t be interested in certain types of projects. These assumptions, even when well-intentioned, are limiting.
The only way to know what someone wants is to ask them. Don’t decide on their behalf what opportunities they’d be interested in based on your mental shortcuts. Let people surprise you. They often will.
19. How Do I Respond When My Bias Is Pointed Out?
Here’s the real test. Someone—maybe a colleague, maybe a friend—suggests that you showed bias in a decision or comment. Do you get defensive? Explain it away? Or do you sit with the discomfort and genuinely consider whether they might be right?
Nobody likes being called out. It feels like a personal attack on your character. But bias isn’t about being a bad person. Everyone has it. The difference between people who grow and people who don’t is how they handle feedback. If your first instinct is always to defend yourself, you’re probably missing valuable insights about your blind spots.
20. What Am I Willing to Do Differently?
This is the question that matters most. Self-awareness without action is just navel-gazing. You can recognize every bias in this list and still do nothing differently. Real change requires discomfort. It means changing hiring practices, speaking up when you see bias in others, amplifying voices that get talked over, and making decisions that feel unfamiliar.
It means sometimes choosing the less comfortable option because it’s the fairer one. That might look like hiring someone whose resume doesn’t fit your mental template but who brings unique strengths. Or advocating for someone who doesn’t self-promote as loudly as their peers. Small actions compound over time, but only if you’re willing to take them.
Wrapping Up
These questions don’t have easy answers. That’s the point. Unconscious bias isn’t something you fix once and move on from. It’s a continuous practice of self-examination, humility, and willingness to be uncomfortable.
The people doing the best work on their biases aren’t the ones who think they’ve solved the problem. They’re the ones who keep asking questions, stay curious about their blind spots, and remain open to being wrong. Start there, and you’re already ahead of most people.