Anne Gregory remembers the child’s fondness for the Dewey decimal system. He would write down a combination of numbers and letters on a scrap of paper and hunt down the desired book in the library. Details were his thing. He once wrote several pages outlining the sequence of moves needed More
Human beings are simplifiers. We are cognitive misers, exerting the least amount of mental effort that we can in making decisions. We rely on heuristics, or mental shortcuts, to take the fastest route from A to B. And we are categorizers. The tendency to conceive of the world around us More
The killing of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis three months ago and the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Wisconsin have led the US to a period of reckoning. As thousands have marched in the streets to protest against racial inequality, many others have also been forced More
Few can speak more authoritatively to the subject of racial bias than Stanford psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt. In her 2019 book Biased, the MacArthur genius unpacked decades of research, some performed by herself and her colleagues, that helps explain how bias operates powerfully, but sometimes subconsciously, in the brain. GEN caught up with Eberhardt to More
APS Member/Author: Elizabeth Levy Paluck The contact hypothesis in psychology predicts that prejudice can be reduced when rival groups come together under optimal circumstances of cooperation and equal status. To date, the weight of real-world evidence for this hypothesis comes from self-reported attitudes after self-initiated contact, not from preregistered randomized More
Change is afoot in corporate America. For the past two months, everyone from Chevron to Comcast and Hershey’s to Harvard Business School has put out statements containing the phrase “We stand in solidarity with the Black community,” or some very close variant. The sudden outpourings of corporate sentiment were widely More
