Rant alert! Beware! Just read some research—crazy stuff that perpetuates stereotypes and bias and went a little nuts.
What is wrong with us?!
I’m thinking we’ve lost our collective minds. Why? Buying into nonsense that people who are bald, yep bald, make better leaders.
Come on!
As leaders, we’ve worked long and hard to stamp out overt bias in the workplace.
Then folks fawn like star-struck finders-of-the-holy-leadership-grail over a ridiculous Wharton School study revealing baldness to be a business advantage for males.
Talk about replacing overt stereotypes with covert ones…yikes!
344 study participants were shown two photos of the same man—one with hair, the other without. In three (!!!) separate tests, subjects found the men with shaved heads to be more masculine, dominant, taller, stronger and to have greater leadership potential than the fellas with hair.
That’s quite a list of powerful conclusions…all derived from just looking at a picture of a bald man. This kind of mental-programming silliness shouldn’t be condoned.
Research by neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux shows that stimuli we encounter goes immediately to two places in the brain: the cerebral cortex and the amygdala. Unfortunately, the amygdala, the pre-verbal emotional part of our brain, reacts first and signals whether we like or dislike the stimuli based on experience.
So, before the cerebral cortex can even consciously think about what we’ve come upon, our brain has already categorized the situation or object.
Given our natural inclination to prefer the known over the unknown, we accept what the amygdala says, allowing ourselves to become prisoners of one point of view, rationalizing our decisions based on previously assigned values and beliefs.
So now, when we see a bald male, we can deduce he’s a superior leader…and not know a single other thing about him!
Psychologists once believed that only bigoted people used stereotypes. Now the study of unconscious bias is revealing the unsettling truth: We all use stereotypes, all the time, without knowing it. We have met the enemy of equality, and the enemy is us. ~Psychology Today
The good news is that we can choose to activate our cerebral cortex and not to fall victim to this nonsense.
We can proactively opt to discard such rubbish that perpetuates old—and builds new—unconscious biases.
Let’s stop the madness!
What say you?
Image credit before my rant question: morgueFile
Someone should tell Larry David!
Let’s make it so!
We should do that, but the evidence suggests that we won’t. Such in-built bias are evident in so many walks of life, whether it’s in business or dating. We make snap judgements about people that often don’t get changed, even when evidence suggests it should be.
Adi — I hear you, yet it’s my heartfelt wish that more people take the initiative to over-ride those inbuilt biases…it’s the only way we’re going to drive change!
Whilst on the face of it this seems nonsensical, if in fact you knew anything about evolutionary psychology, human behaviour and how in fact pre frontal cortex based “free will” was a myth you may wish to review this in a more scientific light.
There is a massive evolutionary reason why human brains have adapted to make “snap” decisions based on very little evidence. This has worked fantastically well in our favour and adaption and survival of the fittest .
Male pattern baldness is normally a result of an over production of testosterone and as we know that particular lovely little bundle of fun also makes males, aggressive, risk taking , stronger individuals. So in fact faced with a choice based on the perceived historical traits of leaders this is fairly accurate assessment
The point ISN’T that human behaviour should be stamped out to conform to some liberal equality ideas, rather that the liberal equality movement needs to redefine what it means by leadership and maybe find a different label for it.