Heidi versus Howard

Business school students were given a case study to read about a successful entrepreneur, a real venture capitalist, describing how this person built a powerful network and rose in the industry. Half the students read the case with the entrepreneur named Heidi. The other half read an identical case, word for word, with the name changed to Howard. Then they rated the person. On competence, Heidi and Howard scored about the same, both were seen as highly capable. But on likeability, Howard was well liked, while Heidi was rated as selfish and less appealing, someone you would not want to work for. Same achievements, same words, different first name. The students had no idea the versions differed. This is a single study with student raters, so hold the specific result lightly, but the deeper pattern it points to, that identical behaviour gets read differently depending on who is doing it, is well supported across a wide body of research.

The exact same behaviour can read as impressive from one person and off-putting from another, based on nothing more than who they are, and the people judging genuinely believe they are reacting to the behaviour itself. This is worth knowing whenever you evaluate people, because your reaction to how someone comes across is shaped by expectations you are not aware you hold. When a candidate strikes you as, say, too aggressive or not warm enough, it is worth asking honestly whether the identical conduct from a different sort of person would have struck you the same way. Often it would not, and the difference is in you, not them.

Blindspot

Banaji and Greenwald, 2013

On the associations that shape judgment below awareness. Worth reading with the caveat that the implicit association test it rests on has been heavily contested since, on both reliability and what it actually predicts.