PRESENTATION

Discrimination is a human rights violation that hinders an equal access to opportunities, generates negative stereotypes  that categorize  individuals and affects  a  person´s  well-being.  As CONAPRED has observed, discrimination is the denial of a person´s equal exercise of freedoms, rights and opportunities and is the result of value differences that come in conflict in plural societies (CONAPRED, 2016).

In the last decade, Mexico has developed an extensive legal framework to uphold the right to non-discrimination as reflected in Article 1 of the Mexican Constitution; the country has also formulated diverse acts and regulations to abolish discrimination. However, despite efforts from multiple stakeholders, discriminatory behaviors are still present at all spheres of Mexican society. Discrimination is difficult to eliminate because it responds to "value differences" between people, but also to the historical, social and cultural construction of uneven power relationships that have been normalized and are not always acknowledge by people who hold privileges.

Among the different forms of discrimination, racism is a prejudice built on considerations that sustain the superiority of certain phenotypes over others. While genomic science has proven human races do not exist, a significant portion of the population around the world and in Mexico, continues to differentiate people - consciously and unconsciously - by their physical characteristics. Discriminatory behaviors and attitudes are so embedded and systematically justified by its members, that neither victims nor perpetrators can longer identify it.

A way forward to understand the social resistance to address systemic discrimination in multicultural and colonialist societies like Mexico, where groups of people present systematic socio-economic disadvantages, human rights violations and restrictions in access to different opportunities, can be found in understanding cognitive biases.

Cognitive biases are systematic errors that are present in the way we think and take decisions in certain contexts. Cognitive biases can have a positive effect, allowing a person to build a worldview and a sense of belonging; however, cognitive biases and the construction of stereotypes associated with them can have a negative character that can lead to prejudices against others.

Implicit cognitive biases were firstly described by Kahneman y Tversky in 1972, who observed that individual judgments and decision-making processes are not fully rational. They are called implicit because they are found in the primordial and automatic part of the brain. It is here where many of the automatic reactions that we have towards others take place and are characterized for being immediate and intuitive (Kahneman, 2012).  Recent studies have shown that most behaviors related to discrimination have an important component of implicit biases that are difficult to address given their complex origin in the brain.

In order to understand the role that cognitive biases play today in discrimination and human rights violations, we organize the First Colloquium on Discrimination, Cognitive Biases and Human Rights.

This event brings together a group of national and international experts from the academia, government, policy making, film and music industries as well as visual artists and social activists that are connecting the dots to better understand discriminatory social behaviors and their impact in public life.