Table 1.

Terminology of bias

Term	Definition
Discrimination	Discrimination is “the result of either implicit or explicit biases and is the inequitable treatment and/or impact of general policies, practices, and norms on individuals and communities based on social group membership” (64, p. S5).
Ethnicity	Ethnicity is “a social system defining a group that shares a common ancestry, history or culture with some combination of shared geographic origins, family patterns, language, or cultural norms, religious traditions, or other cultural and social characteristics” (106, p. 325).
Explicit bias	Explicit forms of bias include “preferences, beliefs, and attitudes of which people are generally consciously aware, endorsed, and can be identified and communicated” (22, p. 1).
Hidden curriculum	“Lessons taught through socialization of learners especially as it pertains to professionalism, humanism, and accountability, as opposed to explicitly taught in the classroom or bedside” (89, p. 50).
Implicit bias	Implicit biases are “unconscious mental processes that lead to associations and reactions that are automatic and without intention and actors have no awareness of the associations with a stimulus. Implicit bias goes beyond stereotyping to include favorable or unfavorable evaluations toward groups of people.” While we are not aware these implicit biases exist, they have a significant impact on decision making (97, p. 14).
Institutional racism	Institutional racism (structural) “refers to the processes of racism that are embedded in laws (local, state and federal), policies, and practices of society and its institutions that provide advantages to racial groups deemed superior while differentially oppressing, disadvantaging or otherwise neglecting racial groups viewed as inferior” (107, p. 107).
Race	“Race is primarily a social category, based on nationality, ethnicity, phenotypic or other markers of social difference, which captures differential access to power and resources in society. It functions on many levels and socializes people to accept as true the inferiority of nondominant racial groups leading to negative normative beliefs (stereotypes) and attitudes (prejudice) toward stigmatized racial groups which undergird differential treatment of members of these groups by both individuals and social institutions” (107, p. 106).
Racism	“Racism is an organized social system in which the dominant racial group, based on an ideology of inferiority, categorizes and ranks people into social groups called ‘races’ and uses its power to devalue, disempower, and differentially allocate valued society resources and opportunities to groups defined as inferior... A characteristic of racism is that its structure and ideology can persist in governmental and institutional policies in the absence of individual actors who are explicitly racially prejudiced” (107, p. 106).
Role modeling	Role modeling is a mechanism for teaching behavior through learning by observation (52, p. 26).
Stereotype	A stereotype is “a fixed set of attributes associated with a social group” (49, p. 209).
Stereotype threat	Stereotype threat “occurs when cues in the environment make negative stereotypes associated with an individual’s group status salient, triggering physiological and psychological processes that have detrimental consequences for behavior” and performance of the individual who identifies as a member of the stereotyped group (11, p. S169).