Author: Pragya Agarwal
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 414
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My Review: 🌟🌟🌟🌟/5
The book digs deep into how each of us form and carry unconscious bias of some sort. We judge, we exclude people, we stereotype. Many biases are formed throughout our life, though societal and parental conditioning and held at the subconscious level. Biases are linked intrinsically to our notion of self-concept and self-identity which is why it is difficult to shake them off. Social categorization occurs spontaneously when we meet new people. Without realization we tend to assign a category based on race, class, gender etc.
In this book the author puts forward her points based on various studies and experiments. She tries to make us understand through various stories and instances from her own life. While going through the book I came across several new information and trust me when you open the book you are going to find it all highlighted. When we finish reading a non-fiction we often forget to put our learnings into practices but with this book i didn’t want to forget anything. We are complex beings living in a problematic society with deep-rooted thoughts and beliefs which tend to influence our judgments often in the wrong manner. Our brains have evolved to reason adaptively rather than rationally or truthfully.
The book is very well researched and talks about numerous topics starting from gut instincts to herd mentality, from racial bias to explicit hate crimes. Lastly it also talks about de-biasing and how we need to activate our logical and rational thinking and actively get rid of any biases that can effect our decision-making process. Overall it was a very informative read but does contain several technical terms and situations which can be a little bit difficult to understand but at every page author has added footnotes explains any jargons if used. If you want to get an in depth knowledge regarding unconscious bias you can definitely pick it up.
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