In this edition of Shadows & Insight in Practice, we explore cognitive bias through the lens of Professional Dangerousness, and the deeper dynamics that shape how bias forms in assessment and practice decisions.

Misconceptions About How Practice Is Shaped

Bias is often where reflection stops – not because it is the deepest explanation, but because it is the most visible one.

Across safeguarding and human service systems, cognitive bias has become one of the most common explanations for flawed practice decisions. It is grounded in the belief that greater awareness of cognitive bias leads to safer practice, more objective assessment and harmful outcomes for children and families can be reduced.

On one level, this matters. Cognitive bias does influence how information is interpreted, how decisions are made, and how children, young people, and families are understood.

The reality is… in complex practice environments, practitioners are working with emotional intensity, uncertainty, trauma exposure, organisational pressure, relational complexity, and accountability demands, whilst also navigating their own inner processes.

In practice, these dynamics shape what is noticed or missed, how behaviour is interpreted, which risks are prioritised, and what begins to form as a credible account of a young person’s or family’s circumstances.

I have increasingly found myself questioning whether the recognition of bias can limit deeper reflection. While cognitive bias undoubtedly influences decision-making, it often does not fully explain why particular judgments and viewpoints emerge.

The common assumption that recognising bias can reduce the risk of flawed assessment, may in itself be a form of reductionism in practice, especially when the analysis provides an acceptable explanation without further reflection (Very Well Mind: https://www.verywellmind.com/reductionism-definition-and-examples-4583891).

This raises the question: If bias becomes the explanation for flawed practice, what emotional, relational, organisational, and systemic dynamics disappear from view?

Bias as a Spectrum of Awareness

Awareness is not fixed – it shifts under pressure, emotion, and uncertainty.

Cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking, affecting how we process information, perceive others, and make decisions. It can lead to irrational thoughts or judgments and is often based on our perceptions, memories, or individual and societal beliefs.

It is no wonder that cognitive bias is also known as ‘Dangerous Judgment Errors’.

Broadly speaking, bias is a tendency to lean in favor of or against a person, group or idea. It refers to systematic patterns – or deviations – in thinking that shape professional judgment, and is often understood as either:

• Explicit – conscious assumptions, beliefs, or preferences that can be recognised and articulated
• Implicit – influences operating more automatically through learned associations outside conscious awareness.

Maybe it is more useful to think of bias, not as a fixed phenomenon, but existing along a spectrum of awareness. At one end are biases practitioners can readily recognise and reflect upon (explicit bias). At the other end, there are influences that remain outside of awareness (implicit bias).

Along this continuum are levels of awareness. We could think of it as unconscious – subconscious – conscious. As an example, biases may be experienced as intuition with some awareness of the factors informing them, but maybe not full awareness.

Bias as a ‘spectrum of awareness’ is dynamic. Under conditions of stress, uncertainty, time pressure, or emotional demand, practitioners may move toward more automatic and less conscious forms of interpretation.

Awareness can narrow, making it harder to recognise the influences shaping perception and decision-making.

Beyond Narrow Explanations

When explanation becomes too narrow, it can obscure understanding of what shapes practice decisions.

Cognitive bias is not a standalone phenomenon. It is not only shaped by practitioner thoughts, emotions, and expectations, it is also formed within environments characterised by uncertainty, organisational pressure, time constraints, relational complexity, accountability demands, and ongoing risk.

Within these conditions, bias may be better understood as a visible expression of deeper emotional, relational, organisational, and systemic dynamics, for example:

• Anxiety under threat can contribute to attribution bias (risk is located in one person)
• Overwhelm and fatigue can contribute to omission bias (harm is overlooked)
• Organisational pressure can reinforce confirmation bias (early narratives become fixed)
• Fear of escalation can strengthen outcome bias (justifying outcomes, not reasoning)
• Time pressure can increase reliance on heuristics bias (reliance on mental shortcuts).

Decision-making occurs within conditions of complexity and uncertainty – recognising bias is important, but awareness alone does not remove the conditions that shape it (Munro, 2011).

Systems influence what becomes expected, rewarded, normalised, and defensible. Under pressure, practitioners and organisations can gravitate toward interpretations that reduce complexity, restore coherence, and create a sense of safety in uncertainty.

Cognitive bias provides important language for understanding how professional judgment can be influenced. The risk is, bias becomes the endpoint of reflection, as though naming it is a sufficient explanation.

Rather than asking what bias is present, reflection begins to shift toward the conditions shaping how the child’s, young person’s and family’s situation is being seen and understood.

It is here that a more integrated lens becomes necessary.

The Professional Dangerousness Lens

What appears as cognitive bias is often the end point of a much earlier shaping of perception.

Professional Dangerousness is not an extension of bias theory. It is a lens for understanding how psychological, relational, organisational, and systemic dynamics shape assessment, responses, and practice decisions, ultimately influencing outcomes for children, young people, and families.

Originally defined by Tony Morrison (1990), Professional Dangerousness refers to the process whereby professionals can unintentionally collude with family dynamics in ways that increase risk and harm. It can be seen repeatedly within child maltreatment death reviews across Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, yet often remains under-recognised.

Professional Dangerousness operates largely through anxiety responses, defence mechanisms, and survival strategies that function outside conscious awareness. In the face of uncertainty, trauma exposure, emotional intensity, relational complexity, and organisational pressure, practitioners and services naturally seek to reduce anxiety, create certainty, and restore a sense of control.

These responses are human and understandable. However, they can also influence how family circumstances are interpreted and responded to. Risk and harm may be minimised, rationalised, denied, normalised, or reframed in ways that make complexity feel more manageable.

A number of key devices contribute to this process, including The Concept of Helping, Natural Love, Misplaced Optimism, Cultural Relativism, Reframing Care and Control, and Survival Responses. These devices influence what becomes visible, believable, prioritised, and defensible within practice.

From this perspective, cognitive bias may be understood as a visible expression of deeper Professional Dangerousness dynamics. Anxiety responses, defence mechanisms, organisational pressures, and key devices can create conditions in which particular assumptions, interpretations, and biases become more likely to emerge.

A key distinction is this... within much of the cognitive bias literature, bias itself is viewed as the problem. Through a Professional Dangerousness lens, bias may instead be understood as a signal pointing towards deeper dynamics operating beneath awareness. The focus therefore shifts from identifying bias to understanding the conditions shaping it.

The focus shifts from “What bias is present?“ to “What is driving the bias?”

A useful distinction may be:

• Cognitive Bias asks: What assumptions influenced my thinking?
• Professional Dangerousness asks: What internal and external conditions shaped what became thinkable in the first place?

The task of reflection is therefore not simply to identify bias, but to bring these underlying conditions into awareness before they begin to organise perception and practice.

A Real-World Example

Attribution bias

This practice example returns to the question raised at the beginning: “When we name bias, what becomes less visible?” Whilst drawn from a single case, it reflects a pattern I’ve seen across many complex practice environments.

Kate (13yrs) and her family were referred to a family support service following family violence concerns, with intermittent exposure to verbal intimidation. The initial assessment appropriately focused on safety and risk.

As assessment progressed, attention narrowed towards the father’s behaviour, interpreted through patterns of aggression and control. A clearer narrative began to form, and he became positioned as the primary source of harm. In supervision, this was understood as attribution bias – the tendency to explain behaviour through disposition rather than relational or contextual factors.

What became less visible was Kate’s emotional experience; alongside exposure to violence, there was ongoing neglect, parental absence from both parents and minimal emotional repair following family arguments.

Personal and organisational factors

In reflective supervision, it became clearer that the attribution bias was not operating in isolation.

The practitioner was experiencing significant anxiety when engaging with the family. The father’s behaviour evoked memories of her own childhood exposure to family violence, where similar dynamics were associated with fear and unpredictability. Over time, her attention became increasingly organised around identifying and managing this aspect of risk.

Anxiety responses began to shape practice behaviour, including avoiding difficult conversations, shortening home visits, and focusing assessment on the most visible source of threat. While understandable, these responses made it harder to remain curious about the broader family context and Kate’s day-to-day emotional experience.

Alongside this, organisational conditions, including high caseloads, limited reflective space, and pressure to progress cases, reinforced a narrowing of assessment.

A simpler narrative began to emerge: The father became the identified source of harm, while other experiences became less central to intervention.

Bringing it all together

Attribution bias provided a useful description of what was occurring in the assessment. Attention had become increasingly focused on the father’s behaviour, with risk primarily located within him.

However, naming the bias alone did not explain why this interpretation had become so dominant.

Through a Professional Dangerousness lens, the bias could be understood as emerging within a wider set of psychological and organisational conditions. The practitioner’s anxiety, her own emotional associations with family violence, and organisational pressures all contributed to a narrowing of attention around the most visible and emotionally compelling form of harm.

As a result, the violence remained central to assessment, while the ongoing emotional neglect experienced by Kate from both parents became progressively harder to sustain in professional thinking. The neglect had not disappeared from the family system; it had become less visible within the assessment itself.

What was initially understood as attribution bias was therefore also shaped by deeper dynamics operating beneath awareness.

The bias described the pattern. Professional Dangerousness helped explain what was driving it.

The young person’s experience

For Kate, the violence in the home was experienced as an ongoing emotional climate of daily life. It shaped how she stayed safe within an unsafe family system. Over time, she adapted by becoming highly attuned to adult states, containing her own emotions and carefully managing what she expressed.

Kate would not have described her experience as ‘emotional neglect’. Rather, she experienced a gradual shaping of what felt normal, safe, and expected within relationships. There was a persistent absence of emotional availability, comfort, and repair following conflict.

As professional attention became increasingly focused on the physical violence, these aspects of Kate’s experience received less attention. The issue was not that emotional neglect was hidden; it was present throughout. However, it became less central to how the situation was understood and responded to.

For Kate, this was experienced as moments of being unseen, unheard, and misunderstood. In this way, the assessment process unintentionally echoed part of her experience within the family itself: some aspects of her story were recognised, while others remained difficult to hold in view.

Practice learnings

Kate’s story illustrates several recurring dynamics that commonly shape assessment and decision-making in complex practice environments:

• Early narratives can narrow perception and reduce what remains visible in assessment
• Naming bias can explain interpretation without addressing what has been missed
• Anxiety responses influence what is explored, avoided, and prioritised.
• Organisational pressures can simplify complexity and reinforce defensible narratives.
• A young person’s experience can fade from view unless it is actively held in mind.

An invitation for deeper reflection

When assessment begins to feel increasingly certain; it can be useful to pause and consider what may be shaping certainty.

This is not simply about challenging assumptions. It is about slowing down interpretation, creating space for the young person’s experience, and becoming curious about the conditions contributing to how meaning is being constructed.

• What am I most convinced of right now?
• What evidence might challenge this view?
• What am I feeling in response to this situation?
• What am I finding difficult to see, hear, or pay attention to?
• What organisational or systemic pressures might be influencing my thinking?
• What assumptions am I making – what else might be true?
• What might the young person say is most important?

It can also be useful to notice internal responses that may be operating beneath awareness, such as a pull toward certainty, discomfort with ambiguity, a need to resolve complexity, or a tendency to simplify what feels emotionally difficult to hold.

The goal is not to eliminate bias (that would not be possible) or arrive at perfect objectivity. It is to strengthen awareness of the conditions shaping perception before they narrow what becomes visible, thinkable, and actionable in practice.

Insight of the Month

What is missed in practice is not always hidden. Sometimes it is present the entire time, but beyond what has become the focus.

In complex practice, it can often be assumed that what is overlooked is something that has been concealed, denied, or undisclosed. Yet some of the most important aspects of a young person’s experience are not hidden at all. They may be present throughout the engagement but become less visible as attention narrows around a particular risk, narrative, or explanation.

As attention narrows, something else can happen. What becomes the focus can begin to feel increasingly important, complete, and certain – not necessarily because it explains the whole situation, but because it is receiving most of our attention.

The reflective question is therefore not only, “What am I missing?” but also, “What has become so central that other important experiences have faded from view?”

Coming up Next…

Professional Dangerousness remains a central focus of this series, exploring how it operates across individual practice, teams, organisations, and inter-agency contexts. When Professional Dangerousness is operating, attention can become organised around particular narratives, relationships, or explanations, making it harder to sustain focus on the child or young person’s lived experience.

Key Professional Dangerousness devices that shape engagement and perception include:

• Natural Love
• Cultural Relativism
• Reframing Care and Control
• Survival Responses
• Misplaced Optimism
• The Concept of Helping.

In future editions, we will explore how these devices intersect with defence mechanisms, anxiety responses and professional judgment, along with implications for practice decisions and outcomes.

Upcoming conference

In July, I will be speaking at the Ending Coercive Control & Family Violence Conference NSW, hosted by the Hatchery, on “Unsilencing Children and Young People: Recognising the Language of Harm”.

I have had the privilege of speaking at this conference several times since 2019. I am looking forward to this year’s event and would love to connect with you there 🙂

To register: Ending Coercive Control & Family Violence Conference NSW – The Hatchery

In Closing…

Professional Dangerousness invites us to move beyond the visible expression of bias towards the conditions that shape perception itself.

Across practice, supervision, organisations and systems, judgment is not formed through thinking alone. Cognitive bias is shaped under uncertainty, organisational pressure, and sustained exposure to risk. Within these contexts, interpretation is shaped through emotional responses, relational dynamics, and the need to create coherence within complexity.

When bias becomes the explanation, reflection can stop at what is most visible. A Professional Dangerousness Lens asks a different question: What is shaping what becomes visible in the first place?

For children, young people, and families, this matters. The shadows within practice influence what systems are able to see, sustain, and respond to, and ultimately, what is held, missed, or acted upon.