Bias, Power, and the Illusion of Neutrality

Bias is often framed as a personal defect—an individual failure of judgement that can be corrected through awareness, training, or better intentions. In this view, bias resides primarily in the minds of individuals, and the solution lies in learning to recognise and correct our prejudices.

While this perspective captures part of the problem, it also obscures something more fundamental. Bias is not simply psychological. It is shaped by the social positions we occupy, the power we hold within institutions, and the unconscious processes through which we interpret the world around us.

Understanding bias therefore requires moving beyond the language of individual attitudes and examining how positionality, power, and unconscious dynamics shape the way we see and respond to others.

Because our perspectives are never neutral.

The Comfort of Intentions

Much of the contemporary conversation about bias revolves around intention. When something harmful occurs, the first question often asked is whether the person responsible meant to cause harm.

This emphasis on intention offers a form of reassurance. It allows individuals and institutions to preserve a sense of moral innocence by distinguishing between deliberate discrimination and unintended behaviour.

Yet bias does not require intention to operate.

Many forms of bias function implicitly—through assumptions, expectations, and interpretations that feel entirely reasonable to those who hold them. These assumptions are rarely experienced as prejudice. Instead, they appear as professional judgement, instinct, or common sense.

But what feels like common sense is often shaped by the norms and hierarchies that surround us.

The environments we inhabit—our professional cultures, social backgrounds, and institutional settings—quietly shape what we perceive as credible, competent, or legitimate.

Positionality and the Limits of Neutrality

Our interpretations of the world are always shaped by positionality—the social positions we occupy within broader systems of power.

Positionality includes dimensions such as class, gender, nationality, race, language, education, religion, and citizenship status. These factors influence not only how we experience institutions but also how institutions respond to us.

People who have consistently been treated as credible may come to experience their perspective as neutral or objective. Their authority is rarely questioned, and their judgements are often taken at face value.

Others may have repeatedly had to justify their competence, legitimacy, or presence within professional spaces. This experience often produces a much sharper awareness of how credibility and authority are unevenly distributed.

Neither perspective exists outside the social structures that shape them.

This is why two individuals can observe the same situation and arrive at very different interpretations. What appears reasonable or professional from one position may appear exclusionary or dismissive from another.

Recognising positionality does not undermine expertise or professional judgement. Rather, it reminds us that all knowledge is situated. Our perspectives are always influenced by the positions we occupy and the experiences that have shaped us.

Power and the Distribution of Credibility

Bias becomes particularly consequential when it intersects with power.

Power is often associated with formal authority—leadership positions, management roles, or decision-making responsibilities. Yet power also operates in more subtle forms. It can emerge through reputation, expertise, institutional status, or alignment with dominant norms of professionalism.

These forms of power influence whose voices are taken seriously and whose experiences are questioned.

In many professional environments, credibility is not distributed evenly. Some individuals are ‘instinctively’ trusted, while others must repeatedly demonstrate their competence or legitimacy. Some perspectives are welcomed as authoritative contributions, while others are interpreted as emotional, subjective, or disruptive.

These patterns often develop without deliberate intention. They are reproduced through everyday interactions, assumptions, and institutional cultures.

Over time, they shape who feels able to speak, who feels heard when they do, and whose interpretations of events become accepted as authoritative.

The Psychoanalytic Dimension of Bias

Bias is also sustained by psychological dynamics that operate beneath the surface of conscious awareness.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, our perceptions of others are often shaped by processes such as projection, identification, and defence. We interpret the behaviour of others through emotional frameworks that are themselves shaped by our histories, experiences, and internalised social norms.

Projection is particularly relevant. It occurs when we attribute our own assumptions, anxieties, or expectations to others, believing we are responding objectively to their behaviour.

Yet these projections rarely attach themselves randomly. They are shaped by the positionalities and power relations that structure our environments.

For example, we may unconsciously interpret the behaviour of those with less institutional authority through suspicion or doubt, while extending greater credibility or patience to those who already occupy positions of recognised expertise or legitimacy.

The same behaviour can therefore be interpreted very differently depending on who performs it.

Confidence may be seen as leadership when expressed by someone whose authority is already recognised, yet interpreted as arrogance when expressed by someone whose legitimacy is unconsciously questioned. Disagreement may be welcomed as intellectual engagement from a respected colleague while framed as hostility or insubordination when it comes from someone positioned lower within institutional hierarchies.

These interpretations often feel rational because they align with the institutional norms we have internalised. Yet they are also shaped by unconscious emotional responses that mirror broader patterns of authority and legitimacy.

In this sense, our psychological reactions are not separate from the social world; they are formed within it.

Recognising this dimension of bias requires examining not only our decisions but also the emotional frameworks through which we interpret others.

Accountability Rather Than Neutrality

The goal of confronting bias is not to eliminate subjectivity or achieve perfect neutrality. Neutrality is an illusion.

Instead, the task is to cultivate accountability.

This means recognising that our perspectives are shaped by the positions we occupy and the power we hold within institutions. It means acknowledging that our interpretations are never entirely detached from the social and psychological contexts that formed them.

Practising accountability requires asking uncomfortable questions:

Whose perspectives do we instinctively trust?

Whose credibility do we question?

Whose voices are heard easily, and whose must struggle to be recognised?

These questions do not produce simple answers. But they create space for more reflective and responsible practice.

Bias will always exist. What matters is whether we are willing to examine how our power, positionalities, and unconscious assumptions shape the way we see others.

Because the problem is not simply that bias exists.

The problem is the belief that our judgements are ever truly neutral.

From Reflection to Practice

These questions are not purely theoretical. They are central to the way institutions operate and to the decisions professionals make every day.

At the Centre for Transnational Development and Collaboration (CTDC), these dynamics are a core focus of our advisory and educational work. Through organisational diagnostics, facilitation, and professional learning programmes, we support institutions and practitioners to examine how bias, positionality, and power relations shape their organisational cultures, decision-making processes, and safeguarding practices.

Our educational programmes and trainings in particular engage participants in critical reflection on implicit bias, authority, and power relations, helping professionals recognise how unconscious assumptions influence credibility, accountability, and responses to harm. Rather than approaching bias as a purely individual problem, these programmes explore how institutional environments, hierarchies, and professional norms shape the ways people interpret and respond to one another.
Developing this awareness is not about achieving perfect neutrality. It is about cultivating the analytical and ethical capacity to recognise how power and positionality shape our perceptions—and to act more responsibly because of it.

Learn more about our services.