please welcome Stanford professor of psychology and MacArthur Genius grant awardee dr. Jennifer Eberhardt I'd like to tell you a story I'm waiting for iris to appear this is iris okay check iris out she's 28 years old and she lives in Los Angeles she has a pet fish named Columbo and she's working on her master's degree she also has a brown belt in Taekwondo now I want you to answer this to yourself silently which one is iris how many of you said this one raise your hand if you said that okay what about this one okay well the second one is right did any of you have trouble finding iris it's okay to be honest you had Jim okay all right I have another story for you this is joy and joy is 31 years old and she lives in Boston she works as an administrator she has a dog named Lily and she loves horror movies her best friend is her sister Kate now let's do this again which one is joy okay if you thought this one you've got the right joy and here's the thing if you got joy right there's a better chance that you're Asian and if it was easy for you to find iris there's a good chance that you're white so what we've just demonstrated here is a phenomenon that exists across countries across cultures across ethnic groups and it's called the other race effect the reality is that typically we all have trouble distinguishing faces of people from races other than our own and it makes sense right if you think about it most of us simply have less experience with faces from other races we see them less frequently at family dinners at our primary schools in our hometowns and so forth but this isn't just about our environment the other race effect is actually wired into our brains the act of perceiving faces is critical to our ability to function as humans so this highlighted area you see here is the brain's fusiform face area or FFA one of multiple places in the bottom back of the brain that helps us to distinguish faces the FFA helps us to differentiate the familiar from the unfamiliar the friend from the foe and over the past few years working with my team at Stanford University we've shown that the FFA actually becomes more active its neurons firing more vigorously when people see faces of their own race when they see faces from other races though the neurons are less active so what's happening is this our experiences are actually tuning our neurons our brains are being wired by the people that waste around ourselves with so it's not just in our minds it's actually right there in our neural passages the connections that make it possible for us to categorize familiar unfamiliar similar different us then and this process of categorization doesn't stop at simple identification it extends to the beliefs and the feelings we attribute and assign to people with certain characteristics whether we like it or not we all carry beliefs and feelings about all sorts of social groups beliefs that influence our perceptions and our actions even when we're not aware of it this is the definition of unconscious bias it's like the orchestra example blessing told us about now check this out take a look at these images researchers have found that simply seen images like like this can intensify stereotypes seeing a picture of a male police officer for example makes you think that men should be police officers and that women should not be and when our stereotypes are reinforced even in that simple subtle way it can lead women to actually perform differently for example let's take another look at joy when joy is subtly reminded of her gender identity before taking the challenging math test her performance plummets that's because in the u.s. and in other countries there exists a stereotype that women are not that good at math right yet when joy is prompted to think about herself as Asian her performance Rises on that very same math test right same woman staying different outcome that's how deeply ingrained these biases can be and the thing is this simply having knowledge of societal beliefs about our group can influence how we perform we don't have to personally endorse those beliefs we don't even have to live in a society where those beliefs first emerged that's how powerful these unconscious biases are when you think of a lawyer or president do you think of a male or a female what about someone cooking dinner over a hot stove and your mind's eye when you see a banker what color is their skin what about someone in jail people often say seeing is believing but in many cases believing is seeing as we go through life these kinds of connections get wired into our brains day after day year after year despite our intentions and without our permission it's part of being human it's how we sort and categorize the overload of stimuli that constantly bombard us at any given moment it brings coherence to a chaotic world so whether you like it or not if you have a brain you have bias bias isn't always bad or wrong it actually helps us to decide to approach the house pet but leave the wild animal alone so that's a good thing right yeah bias it's it's a marker of our history it's a marker of where we've been and what we've seen but left unchecked unconscious bias can lead to great detriment for social groups and the world that we share it can shackle us in place