Are You Biased

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Today there was an article in a local paper here in Chicago that put out some results of studies if people were biased.

One thing that interested me was a test that has been conducted like 600,000 times where people were in a video type game and had a gun. They would walk down a street and they would see people with cell phones, wallets, and GUNS. They were to shoot the people with Guns and holster their weapon when someone wasn't holding a gun.

The result showed that if the person they were approaching was black, they were either quicker to shoot (if they had a gun) or slowing to holster their weapon. While the difference was in Milliseconds, the part that I think was the most interesting is that it didn't matter if the test taker was white, latino, black, etc. The times were the same.

There was mention also of numbers of people biased in their day to day lives about people being male/female, old/young, etc The one that struck me was thin or overweight. It was interesting some of the comments made on that. One respondent said that if a person can't take care of their own body, how can they be trusted to take care of my business. Another said, heavier people take more sick days and health costs are higher, so hiring them is a bigger risk than non-smokers who are thin.

So, I wanted to put it out to BP... do you think being biased is natural? Do you think it is a more statistical thing like the Insurance Industry where they have proven numbers... etc?