Stereotypes
The Basic Idea
Imagine you are conducting a job interview for an administrative assistant role at your real estate company. The following two candidates are presented to you:
Josh has dyed his hair bleach blond and has a long beard. He has a tattoo sleeve and a nose piercing. He speaks with a heavy accent.
Amelie has long brown hair. She is wearing a little bit of makeup, but no extreme colors. She is well dressed and speaks eloquently.
Based on these two descriptions, which candidate would you hire? Your initial instinct is likely to hire Amelie. Yet, you have absolutely no information on what kind of experience either candidate has – so how did you come to make that choice?
It is likely that you relied on a stereotype. Stereotypes are preconceived ideas about a person based on what people from a similar group might ‘typically’ be like.1 They cause us to make snap judgments based on a few characteristics – such as the inclination dyed hair, tattoos and piercings might make someone a worse candidate for an administrative role. A gender stereotype may also have led you to believe that a female is more suited to a secretarial position.
While stereotypes can lead to faulty conclusions and discriminatory practices, they do exist for a reason. If we aren’t presented with enough information, is relying on generalizations an appropriate response? Might stereotypes have certain advantages?
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
– Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in her TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story”2
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
