Everyone’s behaviour is impacted in some ways by their personal,  organizational (e.g., home, non-profit, corporation, govt, corporate) and  societal (aka – cultural) bias.

Efforts can be made to override these bias which ultimately inform your behaviour but true impariality is impossible to achieve.

Some roles, for example a judge or a jury member, are founded on expectation of factual based analysis and associated recommendations or decisions.

Even in these cases though true neutrality is not possible.  Your environment, values and prejudices cannot be removed fully no matter how hard you try.

Attempting to put aside these personal filters and view with an open mind is admirable and a task well worth undertaking.   The closer we can come to achieving neutrality the fairer the assessment.

Two Sides

Consider a refugee or political escapee petitioning a government to grant them asylum.  The country they are from claims this person is a terrorist or political agitator.

Their target country seeks to make a fair assessment.  Is this individual being unfairly persecuted or are they an agitator or terrorist.

The assessment of course begs the question, by whose standards.  Which bias, if any, should be applied to the ultimate judgement.

If the refugee has made it safely to their new home, the judgement will be driven by that countries filters otherwise they will probably waste away in a prison.

In one country, this person may be viewed as a terroist and in another as an oppressed fugitive who is being unjustly persecuted. Who is right?  So often the answer is driven by our built in bias.

Is a Fair Assessment Possible

In North America we attempt to ensure fairness in judgement by designing and following practices which have a focus on removing bias and encouraging fairness.

While the North American judicial systems are not perfect and have been shown to occassionally arrive at erroneous judgement, I find it comforting they strive for fairness  as an ideal.