The Two-Minute Game that Reveals How People Perceive You

We often write about B-school research findings in this space. Now we’re going to let you take part. This video, presented by Harvard Business School associate professor Michael Norton, is a game. In fact, it’s the same game Norton used in research he recently conducted, so when you play the game here, you’ll be doing exactly what Norton’s subjects did. The game is simple and doesn’t take long.

To play it, you’ll need a friend. Once you have a friend with you, just play the video and listen to Norton’s instructions. When you’re done, Norton will walk you through his findings.

The Costs of Racial “Color Blindness”

by Michael I. Norton and Evan P. Apfelbaum  

It’s a natural tendency, proven time and again in research: When you see a new person, one of the first things you notice is his or her race. In business life, however, we typically pretend wedon’tnotice—a behavior that’s called “color blindness”—because we want to reduce our odds of exhibiting prejudice or engaging in discrimination, or of seeming to do either.

Our research, conducted with our colleague Sam Sommers, of Tufts University, shows that there are drawbacks to the color-blind approach. In a series of experiments, we found that when people avoided referring to race in situations that cried out for a mention of it, other people perceived them as moreracially biased than if they’d brought the subject up.

We asked 30 white adult participants to play the role of the questioner in a version of the child’s game Guess Who? Each was paired with a partner (some partners were white, some black) who was assigned a target face from a sheet containing photos of 32 faces. The participants were told to ask their partners yes or no questions (“Does the person have a mustache?” “Does the person have blue eyes?”) to try to identify the target face, aiming to do so with as few questions as possible. Half the faces on each sheet were white, and half were black. Obviously, one of the fastest ways to zero in on the target would be to ask about race—the answer would eliminate half the field. But the questioners tended to shy away from that strategy, particularly when their partners were black: For example, just 57% of those who played with a white partner, and 21% of those who played with a black partner, used the word “black” or “African-American” in a question. And the people who did looked uncomfortable and anxious.

Guess Who?

After the exercise, we asked a different group (all white) to evaluate the questioners’ performance. The results were striking: These outside observers tended to perceive questioners who had ignored race as being more biased than those who had asked about it.

In another experiment, we asked white participants of various ages to play the game, again taking the role of questioner. We observed that avoiding race as an identifier appears to be a learned behavior: Although many participants under 10 asked about race, those over 10 generally didn’t.

Rather than avoiding race, smart companies deal with it head-on—and they recognize that “embracing diversity” means recognizing allraces, including the majority one, to avoid showing preference or creating a backlash. For example, Time Warner’s annual diversity summit isn’t just for people of color (or women)—it’s populated by white males, too. Talking about race can feel awkward, but over time more companies will discover that doing so is usually better than pretending it doesn’t exist.