We all have common-sense theories about which personality characteristics go together. We tend to assume that an intelligent person will also be friendly and they’re unlikely to be self-centred. We expect frank people to be brave and shy people to lack ambition. These assumptions are know as implicit personality theories. Most people usually grab any useful shortcuts and all sorts of preconceived idea based on their job to guess which person it could be. These are stereotypes and might be wrong but if they’re right, it saves them having to approach everyone. However problems arise when we stop challenging our assumptions. Based on nothing more than a photograph, people are happy to decide a good looking person is not only attractive but sociable and interesting. Even names can lead to certain expectations. When people try to predict someone’s behaviour, they tend to overestimate the influence of personality and to underestimate the effect of situation.
A common situation when someone asked you how good you were as a manager, you might give specific examples of how you react in certain circumstances, but if someone asked you how good your manager was, would you take into account the circumstances they have to deal with at work or make your decision based on what you think they’re like as a person? The less information we have, the more likely we are to rely on stereotypes to fill in the gaps. If you see a well-groomed lady with full of accessories standing on a street corner, you might decide she is an easy ‘pick up’ chick, when in fact she could be waiting for a cab to make a surprise visit for her husband at work. What people know about the way our brains make assumptions, how automatic and ingrained they are, we simply couldn’t guarantee that those snap judgements weren’t based by stereotypes.
We all need to make sense of the world, and it helps to make judgement quickly, but we have to ask ourselves how much we are assuming and how much we actually know. Why shouldn’t a shy person be ambitious as well?