The Power of Mental Auto-Completes

Why do biases and stereotypes persist despite our best intentions?

I first coined the phrase "mental auto-completes" in Beyond Leaning In to talk about unconscious or implicit biases after realizing that the auto-complete emoji function on my phone only provided male emoji options when I typed words like "CEO" or "doctor." The phone doesn't mean to be biased, but its faulty programming is similar to what we experience across our lives and and on a daily basis.

To learn more:

  • View my short Medium piece (4-minute read) about the power of the mental auto-complete

  • Listen to a 7-minute excerpt from the Beyond Leaning In audiobook about the concept here

  • Check out my webcomics below about the mental auto-complete, based on scenes from the book

  • Scroll down to listen to podcast episode 2 about mental auto-completes

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 Interested in a bringing a workshop about the Mental Auto-Complete to your organization?

We’ll use scenes from Beyond Leaning In as case study material to discuss how to:

  • Recognize mental auto-completes and prevent them from occurring

  • Mitigate the negative impact when they do

  • Not internalize the bias if we’ve been subject to mental auto-completes

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