Prejudices Are Harder to Shake Than You Think, with Heidi Grant Halvorson | Big Think

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Can stereotypes be useful? Sometimes they can be, even though a lot of the time they're not. Psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson, author of No One Understands You And What To Do About It, walks through the science of stereotypes and explains how they affect much more than you may realize.

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HEIDI GRANT HALVORSON:

Dr. Heidi Grant Halvorson is a social psychologist who researches, writes, and speaks about the science of motivation. She is the Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia Business School, Senior Consultant for the Neuroleadership Institute, and author of the best-selling books:

Succeed: How We Can All Reach Our Goals, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently, Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing The World for Success and Influence (co-written with E. Tory Higgins), and The 8 Motivational Challenges.

Halvorson is also a contributor to the Harvard Business Review, 99u, Fast Company, WSJ.com, Forbes, The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today.

In addition to her work as author and co-editor of the highly-regarded academic book The Psychology of Goals (Guilford, 2009), she has authored papers in her field’s most prestigious journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, European Journal of Social Psychology, and Judgment and Decision Making. She has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation for her research on goals and achievement.

HGH is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and was recently elected to the highly selective Society for Experimental Social Psychology. She gives frequent invited addresses and speaks regularly at national conferences, and is available for speaking and consulting engagements, primarily in education, marketing, and management. She received her PhD in social psychology from Columbia University.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Heidi Grant Halvorson: One of the most surprising things I think that people learn when you study perception and you look at the research is that we can be influenced as perceivers by stereotypes that we don’t even believe are true. So you don’t have to be a racist or be a chauvinist or be any kind of a bad person to be influenced by stereotypes. It turns out all you need to do is know the stereotype to be influenced by it. Stereotypes really are an example of categorization. Brains have evolved. Human brains have evolved to be very rapid categorizers of things. It’s what allows us to interact with our world so smoothly and effectively, right. So you can go into a room and see a chair for the first time and you know that it’s for sitting and not for eating or climbing because you identify it as a member of the category chair.

Stereotypes are categories of people and sometimes they’re actually very helpful. So we have stereotypes of what police officers or librarians or nurses are like and those stereotypes allow us to fill in the blanks a little bit and know without even talking to a member of that profession something about what their job is, how I’m supposed to interact with them, what it’s reasonable to ask of them, you know. How our interaction is probably going to go. The problem of course is that every stereotype is a generalization that never applies completely accurately to any one person. And sometimes stereotypes are just flat out wrong. They’re just absolutely unnecessarily negative and completely untrue. And yet we are affected by them because again that’s one of these phase one perception things that the activation of stereotypes in the mind is relatively automatic. For example, I’m a female scientist and there are stereotypes about women not being as capable in science and mathematics, so I like to get right out in front with people and, you know, show them, demonstrate my expertise in science and math so that I can counter that stereotype before it has a chance to negatively affect their view of me.

Really when it comes to any of the initial assumptions that people make about you whether they’re based on confirmation bias or the primacy effect or whether it’s stereotyping or the halo effect, which is the tendency for people to think that if you have one good quality you have a lot of other good qualities.....

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