Why Hillary Clinton Gets Interrupted More Than Donald Trump
If you are a professional journalist then it’s your duty to read and understand cognitive bias, and to consciously seek to avoid their influence.
Such differences in the treatment of men and women are often rooted in unconscious biases that all of us fall prey to. Unconscious bias is rooted in our perceptions of others, which can harden into stereotypes and prejudice over time. Bias becomes the lens through which we process information and make decisions. We generally think of skin color, gender, nationality, and age when we consider bias, but unconscious prejudice can affect how we view many other characteristics, including aspects of people’s appearance (height and weight) and personality (introversion and extroversion).
In one well-documented experiment, described in Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, Harvard MBA students evaluated the same case study of a successful entrepreneur. Half the class read a version in which the entrepreneur was male; the other half read a version in which the entrepreneur was female. The students who read about the male entrepreneur identified him as having positive traits, such as leadership and direction, while students who read about the female entrepreneur characterized her as being bossy and overly direct. The responses reflected the students’ hidden biases about how male and female leaders should act.
We may think that we ourselves are immune to such bias, but we aren’t. (If you are unconvinced, try taking an online Implicit Association Test to learn how persistent these biases can be.) Do we hire or promote people who look like us? Do we talk to men and women differently? Do our stereotypical views affect the job assignments and opportunities we give to our staff? The likely answer to all of these questions is yes.
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