We expect our in-group to act like us, and blame the out-group because they are not like us. This hits home hard. Despite everyone saying they are not biased, everyone has some sort of bias in their life, and they unconsciously set certain expectations on our in-group because we expect them to be like us and act like us. Our expectations for our out-group are often associated with bad things, them messing up in some way, or that they will not be "as good as us."

Our biases are so deep into us that we make decisions unconsciously based on them, and we may not even know. We may think that we just sitting next to a random person, or starting a conversation with a random person, but we identify our in-group and are automatically, unconsciously, drawn to them as a result. In order to stay away from the out-group, the "others."

This is a straightforward us vs. them mentality. We see the out-group as "other" and those in our in-group as "like us." We see our in-group as individuals and we "otherize" the out-group and find reasons to keep them in the out-group. Bias at it's finest.

While this bias is thrown out there for dramatic effect, I still can't help but comment. I can both parallel park, and reverse park on the first try, and I've seen men struggle before giving up and driving away. This tends to be a bias among men that women can't park at all because we may not be able to do it "as well as them." But let me tell you, we can do it, and in some cases do it better!

Some of our automatic responses are all based on race, gender, age, and physical disability. There are multitudes of other thinks we can identify, but the most obvious are the ones we see automatically.

This is a massive call out to us. Even if we don't believe we are biased, we all do have the biases, maybe in the deep recesses of our person. Self-identifying is the first step to fixing this.