When ‘Culture Fit’ Becomes a Recipe for Bias

Jenny Chatman (0:00)

Hey, Sameer, it's great to be back with the podcast, and so hard to believe we're starting our sixth season.

Sameer Srivastava (0:07)

I know what you mean. We've had some terrific guests over the last few years, and I always feel like I'm learning something new in these conversations.

Jenny Chatman (0:15)

Me too.

Sameer Srivastava (0:16)

All right. So to start off this season, Jenny, let's begin with an interesting and fun question.

So we know that dating apps love to match people who are supposedly compatible with each other. They have similar interests, the same vibe. Do you think that actually makes for better matches or just more comfortable ones?

Jenny Chatman (0:34)

Well, I'm no expert on dating, having been married for more years than I can share at this point. But what I will say is that psychologists view the similarity attraction bias as almost a law of human behavior. We are attracted to and feel comfortable with people who are similar to us.

But therein lies the bias part of it. And our guest today is really going to unpack this and help us understand what we miss by falling prey to the similarity attraction bias.

Sameer Srivastava (1:07)

Yeah, because it turns out that same trade-off of what's comfortable versus what leads to a good match is actually at the heart of the dilemma that firms face when they're deciding whom to hire as well. So let's get into it.

Jenny Chatman (1:20)

I'm Jenny Chatman, a professor and Dean at the Haas School. And this is The Culture Kit.

Sameer Srivastava (1:26)

And I'm Sameer Srivastava, a professor at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and co-founder of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation.

Jenny Chatman (1:35)

Today, we're joined by Lauren Rivera, an award-winning sociologist. Lauren is the Peter G. Peterson Chair in Corporate Ethics and Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. Her research unpacks how people define and evaluate status and merit, and how those definitions shape social inequalities.

She's also looked deeply at what it means to hire for Culture Fit, a topic we've talked a lot about on this podcast, and how cultural similarities can provide access to desirable jobs and occupations. Her best-selling book, Pedigree, How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs, at Princeton University Press, investigates on-campus recruitment and hiring for elite professional service firms. Lauren is currently working on a variety of projects examining interventions to reduce workplace inequalities. Lauren, welcome to The Culture Kit.

Lauren Rivera (2:34)

Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here.

Sameer Srivastava (2:37)

So Lauren, you and I have known each other since grad school days. As you know, I've been a big fan of your work from the very beginning.

I find it really thought-provoking the way you think about merit and how it can become secondary to less controllable factors when one is evaluating talent in the workplace. So maybe just as background, could you tell us what prompted you to focus on defining and thinking about the role of merit across education and work environments?

Lauren Rivera (3:03)

Yeah. It stems up a little bit from my background. So I grew up in an untraditional background for many academics. I grew up in a low-income family raised by a single mom who had immigrated to the US.

When I was in junior high school, my mom got a job at one of the most elite private schools in LA. So these are the types of places where now paparazzis line the gates. It was a very, very different environment from the background I had grown up in. It was like entering an entirely new world of cultural roles I didn't quite understand. This sparked a long-standing interest of mine in understanding how it is that people size other people up in terms of who has status, who doesn't, who we actually give credibility to, who we don't, what are the various ways that people communicate and understand worth in social settings. And throughout my career, I've studied it in different capacities. I started off with going back to the high school setting. And in undergraduate, I worked on projects looking at what factors shaped people's entrance into popular groups. I ended up studying things like how to bouncer at very elite nightclubs, decide who to handpick out of lines. And while these settings were really fascinating from an intellectual perspective, I was really interested in a status sort that's more consequential than who ends up in the popular clique or the VIP.

And workplaces are one of the most consequential status sorts we end up going through. And in particular, hiring decisions shape not only if you get a job or not, but they shape our ability to enter a particular economic status, a particular social status, and so forth.