As I wrote in the prior blog post, we all have biases that filter much of what we hear, see and think. This means our perceptions and conclusions are distorted. Biases distort reality. This hurts communication too because what the speaker means to convey is not what the hearer gets after the hearer filters the message.

Consider the case of overweight people. Researchers at the University of North Carolina created a test study of perceptions of overweight people. They selected a volunteer audience at random. They hired actors to offer a speech with identical words, gestures, voice inflection, etc. As the actors gave their speeches, the audience rated them on their speaking ability 1-10 with a private, individual electronic device. The audience did not know that the speakers were hired actors.

The audience consistently rated certain speakers much lower than others. Guess who? The overweight speakers. In spite of the fact that the presentations were identical, the audience rated the overweight speakers as less competent.

One of the researchers explained to us what had happened. He said there is a common bias against overweight people. The audience unconsciously applied this bias and used it as a filter for their experience of the speakers. The audience concluded that the overweight people were less competent.

A bias against overweight people is just one example of many biases. In the last blog post, I described a racial bias. Many people have biases against bosses, the elderly, country or city dwellers, foreigners, Democrats or Republicans, Christians or Muslims, etc. The same experiment with overweight people would work with other biases.

Of course these biases and filtering raise havoc in our personal and organization lives. Communication gets distorted constantly. To limit this distortion, you have to start with increasing your awareness of when it is operating in you or your organization.

Increased self-awareness is one of the key outcomes of my Web-conferencing Virtual-Workshop, Leadership Communication™.

We also train participants to discover when the filtering has occurred so distortions can be corrected.

Please check out our Virtual-workshop by listening to recordings of live sessions at http://www.EagleAlliance.com/ho/sa or reading about it at http://www.EmotionallyIntelligentLeadership.com/index.htm#bottom/ – scroll down.