Rapid Decision Making

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Rapid Decision Making

• IE 5511 Human Factors

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Rapid Decision Making

• How do our unconscious biases (implicit
  associations) impact our choices?
• Source Blink The Power of Thinking Without
  Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell, 2005, Publisher
  Little, Brown and Company.

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The author wrote the book because people judged
him differently when he changed his hair from
this .
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To this
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• The author started to get
• Speeding tickets
• Pulled over in airport security lines,
• Ambushed on the sidewalk by a team of police,
• Unconscious biases about hair were impacting
  peoples decisions about how to treat the author.

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Implicit Association Test (IAT) (Greenwald et al,
1998)

• Assumption We make connections more quickly
  between pairs of ideas that are already related
  in our minds.
• See examples of IAT on the following pages
• Categories are defined by two words,
• Categorize the words in the center column

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Categories
Male or Career
Female or Family
Lisa Matt Laundry Entrepreneur John Merchant Bob C
apitalist
Words
Source Blink the Power of Thinking Without
Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell, 2005
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Now, change the catagories to go against
steriotypes
Male or Family
Female or Career
Babies Sarah Derek Merchant Employment John
Bob Domestic
Source Blink the Power of Thinking Without
Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell, 2005
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What does this test tell us?

• Many people are slower to categorize the words in
  the second example,
• This is because they implicitly associate
• Male and career,
• Female and family,
• The IAT exposes judgment biases which we dont
  know we have or expressly try not to have.

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Taking the IAT

• The author, Malcolm Gladwell, took the race IAT
• He was shocked to discover the he (who is part
  Jamaican) had more pro-white associations,
• Taking the test many times did not change this
  result,
• 50 or all African Americans taking the IAT have
  stronger positive associations with whites than
  blacks.

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Taking the IAT

• People who take the IAT may be upset by it
  because even if they belong to a minority group,
  they may hold biases against their own group.
• Their biases, picked up from society may
  contradict of their conscious beliefs.

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How do judgment biases impact what we do?

• Unconscious biases may be incompatible with our
  conscious values
• Unconscious biases are powerful predictors of
  ones behavior in spontaneous situations.

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Examples of outcomes of societal biases

• An inch of height is worth approximately 789 per
  year in salary.
• There are a disproportionate number of tall
  CEOs CEOs in the U.S. are on average 6 feet
  tall white males, but only 14.5 of US males are
  6 feet or taller (Judge and Cable, 2004)

T. A. Judge and D. M. Cable, The Effect of
Physical Height on Workplace Success and Income
Preliminary Test of a Theoretical Model, Journal
of Applied Psychology, vol. 89, no. 1, June 2004,
pp. 428 441.
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Can you change your unconscious biases?

• Yes.
• By being exposed to positive images of the people
  or things whom you have an unconscious bias
  against,
• Martin Luther King
• Olympic winners (of all races)

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To take the IAT, go to

• www.implicit.harvard.edu
• (Need Adobe Flash player).

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Examples of IAT test topics

• Gender
• Religion
• Native American
• Arab-Muslim
• Skin-tone
• Weapons

• Disability
• Race
• Gay-Straight
• Age (young-old)
• Presidents
• Asian-European