3 ms·
Playing the devil's advocate. If someone tells you 'tomorrow you'll meet your new colleague Lars from Sweden' consciously or not you'll form expectation about h
by toto444 6y ago
Playing the devil's advocate. If someone tells you 'tomorrow you'll meet your new colleague Lars from Sweden' consciously or not you'll form expectation about his skin color.
- Grustaf 6y agoGiven that name it IS statistically much more likely that he's white, so would there be anything malicious about that expectation?
- magicalhippo 6y agoI had something like that some years ago. My sister has a friend called Christine, and my sister had mentioned her several times before I first met her. Turned out that while Christine was born and raised here in Norway, she had two Thai parents. There's not a large Thai population here, and Christine is not a name I associated with Thais, so I was quite surprised by it. Not in a positive or negative way, just plain old surprised.
- toto444 6y agoI actually have one as well. At some point I was chatting a lot with a customer agent from one of our partner. To me their name sounded Russian so I assumed they were of Russian origin. Turns out they are from a Sub-saharan African country. Like you I was very surprised when I learnt it.
- notahacker 6y agoTrue, but there's a difference between having an expectation and clumsily articulating it in a welcome meeting. On the balance of probability a new software developer is likely to be male and so you might be surprised that new dev with unisex name is female, but saying "oh, we weren't expecting a woman" when they walk in is obviously going to raise some very significant questions about your attitude
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- falcolas 6y agoWe make all kinds of assumptions every moment of every day. We don’t go yelling it out when those assumptions are wrong, because there’s no need to.