Please welcome Stanford Professor of Psychology and MacArthur Genius Grant Awardee, Dr. Jennifer Eberhardt. Hi, everyone. 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 one. 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 trouble. 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 Willie, 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 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, 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 FSA, 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 we surround 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, familiar, unfamiliar, similar, different, us, them.
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 seeing 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 a challenging math test, her performance plummets.
That's because in the US 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, same test, 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 that they are the ones who are most important? of a male or a female? What about someone cooking dinner over a hot stove?
In 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 a marker of our history.
It's a marker of where we've been and what we've seen. But left unchecked, checked. Unconscious bias can lead to great detriment for social groups and the world that we share. It can shackle us in place.