Activity #1 – Job Association

Your brain catalogs information to help you make snap judgments. Previous experiences, lessons from your family, messages gleaned from the media—all this and more inform how you navigate the world. If you want to know how this works, try this exercise. Fill in the first word or phrase that comes to mind when you see the following job titles.

Used car salesman: ______________________
Politician: ______________________
Lawyer: ______________________
Teacher: ______________________
Doctor: ______________________

Activity #1 often elicits stereotypes that people have about the professions listed. Unfortunately, this tendency to stereotype does not stop when we move beyond career choices. If we were to repeat the same exercise with racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation groups, the associations would come just as easily.

Stereotypes lead to bias if you believe them.

Stereotypes assume that people who share one characteristic, such as sex or skin color, share all other traits. We all know some: blondes are airheaded, men are aggressive, Americans don’t know anything about other countries. This does not mean that there isn’t any truth to stereotypes; they just can’t be applied to everyone in the group. One of our favorite examples of this is the fact that Fortune 500 CEOs are taller than the average population. It’s true. Look it up. So why are they taller? Well, studies suggest that Fortune 500 CEOs are taller than average because people have a positive bias toward tall people. Height is often associated with power and leadership, so at some point American society stereotyped tall people as better leaders.

A more common stereotype is that Asian people are good at math. We are quite certain that many are good at math. A lot of other people are good at math, too. We are also confident that plenty of Asian people are not good at math. But still, the common stereotype might affect the outcome of a job interview without the hiring manager even realizing it. These stereotypical ideas are often locked deep in the recesses of our minds just waiting to creep up and get in the way of our better judgment, fueling the bias—or automatic preferences—we have for one group over another.

If you aren’t aware of the stereotypes you believe, you can’t overcome them.

This kind of unconscious bias is certainly relevant to the politically hot topics of race, gender, and sexual orientation. And evidence shows how our brains lead us to make irrational decisions based on a number of factors. A few examples:

Men with beards are considered more trustworthy than clean-shaven men.

People with accents that are foreign to us are trusted less than people with accents similar to our own.

More people die in female-named hurricanes than in male-named hurricanes, perhaps because people think female names represent less of a threat.

A hiring manager who’s holding a warm drink in his or her hand is more likely to hire a job candidate than when interviewing a similar candidate while holding a cold drink.

Activity #1 helps identify unconscious biases. Activity #2 measures different kinds and intensities of bias. Maybe we should have named this book Having Fun with Bias since there are so many games in here! Some people find this topic depressing and intimidating, but you can have fun with it. In fact, if you are planning to intervene and help some of your well-meaning associates dial down their bias, fun is actually a great approach.