Jessica Nordell | How to Reveal & Change Our Hidden Scripts
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2022
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
Have you ever realized how often you think without really thinking?
Jessica is an award-winning author and science writer known for expertly blending rigorous science with compassionate humanity. With degrees in physics from Harvard and poetry from the University of Wisconsin, Jessica is deeply engaged with connecting across differences to expand and heal the human experience, and her debut book, The End Of Bias: A Beginning, is the culmination of fifteen years of reporting and writing on bias and discrimination and how to solve it. The book, which offers readers hope and direction on how to change their biased behavior, was named a Best Book of the Year by the World Economic Forum, Greater Good, AARP, and INC, and in our conversation today, we dive deeper into some of the fascinating ideas and research presented in her book.
Jessica and I go back in time, and she walks me through some key moments in her life and career that led to her research into these hidden scripts and preferences, what they are, where they come from, how they affect us and offers ideas on how we can realistically examine and change the way we think about and treat others to create more meaningful and compassionate connections with the people around us.
You can find Jessica at: Website | Instagram
- If you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Zoe Chance about how social dynamics and language influence our decisions.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We all grow up in a culture that teaches us categories that are important in that culture. |
| 0:05.7 | Categories of people, social identities, different groups, what categories matter. |
| 0:10.2 | When we encounter a person and we recognize the category or categories they belong to, |
| 0:14.6 | all of that stored information starts to come to the forefront and it starts to influence the way |
| 0:21.3 | that we interact with that person. And I think the other important thing about unconscious bias, |
| 0:26.5 | in addition to the fact that it happens really automatically and spontaneously sometimes, |
| 0:31.2 | is that it can really conflict with who we believe ourselves to be. |
| 0:35.4 | Like we can believe ourselves to be a person who treats others well. In fact, most people do. |
| 0:40.9 | I think most people believe we treat others well. We want to be fair. We want to treat people |
| 0:46.1 | in any egalitarian way. But then the stored memories and associations and stereotypes can really |
| 0:51.7 | interfere with that and cause us to behave in ways that conflict with those values. |
| 0:58.2 | So we never realize how often you think without really thinking. Well, |
| 1:02.9 | according to University of Virginia's psych professor and author Timothy Wilson, |
| 1:07.4 | we're faced with around 11 million pieces of info at any given moment. |
| 1:11.5 | And out of that 11 million, funny thing is we're only actually able to process about 40 bits of |
| 1:17.6 | information. So the result will rather than assessing all the information presented to us, |
| 1:22.4 | our brain compresses all that information and relies instead on our experiences, our beliefs, |
| 1:29.3 | the patterns that we have hidden scripts and history to fill in the gaps, which most often leads |
| 1:35.6 | to snap judgments or decisions. And over time, as we continue to use this imperfect data to navigate |
| 1:41.5 | the world, unconscious biases preferences begin to form. Things were not even aware of, but our |
| 1:47.4 | guiding how we interact with people and often judge them all day long without even realizing it's |
| 1:53.9 | happening. And according to my guest today, Jessica Nordell, if left unchecked, they can and already |
... |
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