Do you remember the classic 90s movie As Good As It Gets? In an Oscar-winning performance, Jack Nicholson utters a now famous line to Helen Hunt, who's helping him confront a long untreated mental illness. He tells her: “you make me want to be a better man.” I think of that line whenever I think of NYU Stern Professor, best-selling author and popular TED talker Dolly Chugh because she’s the person in my life who most consistently inspires me to be better. Dolly studies implicit and explicit bias, and she writes about how science can help us uncover inequities, grow, build more inclusive organizations, and contribute to a more inclusive world. She’s also an incredible human being.
Today, Dolly has an amazing new book out called “A More Just Future: Psychological Tools for Reckoning with Our Past and Driving Social Change” that I highly recommend. And in honor of this exciting milestone, I’m sharing a Choiceology Q&A with Dolly where we talk about the science of stereotyping. I hope you’ll enjoy it, and I hope you’ll also pick up a copy of Dolly’s incredible new book. I promise it will make you want to be a better person, and I predict that with Dolly’s wisdom in hand, you will succeed.
This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads
Forming Good Habits at Work: I had a blast attending the MarketWatch Best New Ideas in Money Festival last month to talk about work habits, and the conversation was turned into an episode of the Dow Jones & Co.’s popular Best New Ideas in Money podcast.
The Scientific Method Can Help with Public Policy: In this new Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed, my collaborators and I share key takeaways from teaming up with the City of Philadelphia last summer to design, implement & evaluate a city-wide vaccine lottery.
Overweighting Small Probabilities: This recent episode of Choiceology explores why we consistently overestimate the likelihood of rare events, and it features an interview with UCLA psychologist Craig Fox.
Quit: Don’t miss Annie Duke’s new best-selling book, which will help you avoid escalating commitment to dead-end jobs, bad investments, unhealthy relationships and more.
Q&A: Stereotypes
In this Q&A from Choiceology, NYU Stern Professor, best-selling author, and TED talker Dolly Chugh explains the origins of stereotypes and how to combat our implicit biases.
Me: Dolly, can we start by talking about where stereotypes come from?
Dolly:Yes. We have an incredibly complex mental architecture that's able to handle 11 million pieces of information per moment. But we don't actually want our brain to be processing everything around us all the time. It would be incapacitating. So, part of that complex architecture is that we have all sorts of shortcuts, heuristics, and biases built-in that cut down our processing load. I think of a stereotype as an absolutely essential mental shortcut we all rely on. It's a pattern that we detect, sometimes accurate, sometimes inaccurate. We use that pattern to help us make sense of the world around us. So as a professor, I might notice a pattern that the students who show up five to ten minutes early for class tend to be better prepared and the students who show up just as the PowerPoint boots up are less prepared. Now, I'm sure you can easily poke holes in my stereotypes. Maybe a student who arrived just in time was actually using every minute to digest the materials for class. That is the downside of stereotypes. We sometimes overgeneralize.
With stereotypes we’re talking about groups of people. In my example, I talked about students coming early, or just in time, or late for class. At work, you might think about the folks over in operations, versus accounting, versus marketing. We all have our broad-brush view of what people from a certain group are like. I think we’re all familiar with stereotypes that exist in our culture or society about different races, ethnicities, genders, and more.
Me: That’s really helpful. Could you talk a bit about the distinction between conscious and unconscious stereotypes?
Dolly:What we now know is that 99.999997% of our mental functioning appears to be happening outside of our conscious awareness, give or take. And we can measure the stereotypes that are affecting both our conscious and unconscious mind. Sometimes these are referred to as implicit versus explicit stereotypes.
Some of my stereotypes are very easy for me to access. I can tell you that I think students who come early for class are better prepared. But some of my stereotypes are held in that autopilot part of my brain that's able to drive home without paying close attention, and still be safe. Those are what we call implicit stereotypes. And we now can measure those. Not perfectly, but we have decent measures.
Me: How can people learn what implicit stereotypes they hold?
Dolly:One publicly available test is called the Implicit Association Test, or the IAT, which has different tests on topics like race, gender, religion, or there’s even a Coke/Pepsi IAT, or an Apple/PC IAT. With this test, we can measure things that people may not consciously endorse or believe, but on an unconscious level they have that stereotype sitting in their minds. People sit down at a computer, play something that feels like a video game — it's fast, millisecond-level response times. I think the latest count was over 20 million IAT have been taken on this free, anonymous website researchers set up. And pretty much everyone seems to have some unconscious bias that isn't necessarily aligned with their conscious beliefs. Very few of us seem immune from this. Some of the findings we see on the race IAT, for example, is that the majority of people show implicit stereotypes in which white people are associated with things like intelligence and safety and black people are associated with things like a lack of intelligence or danger.
Mahzarin Banaji, who's a social psychologist who helped develop the IAT, likes to say that these implicit associations are the thumbprint of our culture. We breathe implicit stereotypes in from the moment we're born. Everything we see and hear, and we're told, and we read, and the songs we listen to, and what we observe on the street, and who does what in our home when we're growing up, and what we're told is good, and what we're told is bad. All the non-verbals of people around us. Interestingly, people are actually pretty good at predicting the implicit stereotypes of people in their societies. But they're not quite as skilled at knowing their own.
Psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum says, "We breathe that in like smog." Smog isn't always visible, but that's what forms our associations.
Me: So how can we combat our implicit stereotypes if we don’t know we have them
Dolly:So, here's the good news and the bad news about implicit stereotypes and biases and attitudes. We haven't yet figured out how you can change the ones you don't like. However, we do know that there's all sorts of ways using contexts, systems, and processes to help you keep your unconscious biases from getting in the way.
So for example, if you're a manager worried that you're not getting enough input from certain groups because of unconscious stereotypes, rather than expecting them to have their input rise to the top on their own, what if you have everyone generate ideas but have the sources of the ideas blinded? So, you don't know if that idea came from manufacturing or from marketing, or whichever group you're worried you're not giving full input to. Research on blinded decisions, like when a hiring manager takes the names off of the resumes they’re evaluating, looks to decrease biased decision-making.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
To learn more about research on stereotypes, listen to the episode of Choiceologywhere we dig into the topic or pick up a copy of Dolly’s first book The Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias. And be sure to also grab a copy of Dolly’s wonderful new book, A More Just Future.
That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in November.
Katy Milkman, PhD
Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Bestselling Author of How to Change