Mahzarin R. Banaji was starting out as an assistant professor of
psychology at Yale University in the late 1980s, at a time when
women professors were scarce enough that administrators eager to
offer a class on the psychology of gender turned to her. Banaji
had no expertise in the area; her research focused on memory.
But she said she would do it, and she quickly found herself
inhabiting the overlapping worlds of gender studies and
psychology. Banaji was fascinated by a memory study by
psychologist Larry Jacoby. He had asked people to read a list of
names from the phone book, such as “Sebastian Weisdorf”, and
rate how easy they were to pronounce. A day later, those same
people were handed a list of names that included famous people,
others from the phone book, and some names from the list they
had read the day before. Asked which were famous people, the
study participants incorrectly classified Sebastian Weisdorf and
others, whose names they had learned just the day before, as
famous. What, Banaji wondered, w