The Bernstein Leadership and Ethics Board hosted a discussion on ‘Unconscious Bias and its Role in Decision Making’ on March 28, 2007 as part of Leadership and Ethics Week at Columbia Business School.Everyone has implicit biases, and the unconscious choices that our minds make in the workplace may shape our decision making process. Hence knowing our hidden biases, which are often at odds with our stated conscious ideals, is a positive step towards effective decision making. In order to get a better understanding of these hidden biases, students were asked to take an online test, the "Implicit Association Test" (IAT), designed by two professors to measure the level of implicit attitudes in people. The students then gained an understanding of the psychology behind such biases and actively participated in the discussion led by Elke Weber, the Jerome E Chazen Professor of Management at Columbia Business School. Professor Weber works at the intersection of psychology and economics. She is an expert on behavioral models of judgment and decision-making under risk and uncertainty. At Columbia, she founded and codirects the Center for the Decision Sciences."While there is some controversy about the extent to which these automatic biases are related to conscious judgments or the decisions we make, it’s very likely that they influence managerial tasks," said Professor Weber. Unconscious biases are the result of past experiences and manifest themselves due to overconfidence, confirmation biases and behavior that become "self-fulfilling prophecies". Mere awareness of these biases is not sufficient to overcome them. Dr. Weber explained that the human mind has multiple processing systems, one experiential or intuitive and the other, analytic. While the two operate in parallel, the former precedes the latter in terms of timing. Since unconscious biases tend to be a result of experiential processing, allowing analytic processes to question our decisions is an excellent way of keeping our biases in check. Other keys to ‘calibrating’ decision-making can include keeping objective records, asking disconfirming questions and using linear models to test or supplement intuitive predictions.