How To Save Your Company From Brad And Chad

Partition dependence bias.

Partition dependence bias, which is detailed well in this new HBR article, basically says that, in a context when people have to choose multiple options out of many available options, and the options are grouped together based on a given dimension, people tend to think, “Let’s choose some from each category.” Therefore, people tend to choose some options from each group, ultimately choosing more diverse options.

Here’s an example, pull-quoted from that HBR article above:

We conducted a study with 121 experienced HR professionals who had an average of eight years of HR-related experience. We asked them to download a zipped folder containing resumes of 16 job applicants who graduated from one of four top universities. In one version of the study, the order of the resumes was random and did not vary by university. In the other version, the resumes from each school were contiguous in the folder (i.e., the files in the folder were sorted alphabetically). All HR managers were asked to select four candidates to interview. We found that when the resumes were randomly interspersed, 14% of managers chose candidates from all four universities, but this number more than doubled to 35% when the resumes were grouped together by university. We found similar results when we grouped candidates by gender, either by listing them contiguously or by using a paper clip to hold their printed resumes together. We found similar results when grouping candidates by ethnicity and nationality.

Long pull-quote, and I apologize, but the general idea is “Let’s choose one from each!” The full paper is here.

Could this actually work towards diversity?