Friday, July 29, 2011

Interesting Social Experiment

You begin with 50 cards. Each card has a picture of a different person on them. The people are varied , different weights from in shape to obese, different levels of attractiveness from ugly to very good looking, different races, different genders, differently groomed from some wearing suits to others with piercings and flip flops etc. Basically a large cross section of our culture. The person in the experiment sits down at table and has 5 different groupings of 10 cards each.

They are told the follow these groupings represent different divisions of a company.
All of the candidates on this table have earned five star rating on their last performance review.
We are starting a division that will oversee these five and we need to promote two candidates from each of the five groups to run the new division.

Who do they pick? Well dressed or sloppy? In shape or obese? What ethnicity? How old? Short or Tall? Male or female?

What does that new selected group of ten look like?

Does it matter who is doing the picking?

Remember they all had the same exemplary performance in the beginning.

Let’s say that we had to keep playing this game that we started with 10 decks of cards and had to select a division of line managers, then from the people that were selected for that we selected regional managers, then from the people that were selected from that the executive council.

Would the bias get more and more pronounced with each iteration?

What do you think?

1 comment:

Bill From Gainesville said...

The in shape good looking people will be the ones chosen