2023年度入試【英文】

As late as 1970, only 5 percent of musicians performing in the top five orchestras in the United States
were women. Today, women compose more than 35 percent of the most acclaimed orchestras, and they play
great music. This did not happen by chance. Rather, it required the introduction of blind auditions. The
Boston Symphony Orchestra was the first to ask musicians to audition behind a screen, and in the 1970s and1980s most other major orchestras followed suit. When they did so, usually in preliminary rounds, it raised
the likelihood that a female musician would advance by 50 percent and substantially increased the proportionof women hired.
In theory, an orchestra director cares about the sounds coming out of the bassoon, the flute, and thetrumpet, not the ethnicity or sex of the person playing the instrument. In practice, the Vienna Philharmonic,
for example, admitted its first female player in 1997. Not so long ago. Orchestra directors and selection
committees were quite comfortable with all-male, all-white orchestras and likely not aware of their biases.
To change this, no great technological feat was required, just awareness, a curtain, and a decision. Or, more
precisely, a design decision. A simple curtain doubled the talent pool, creating amazing music andtransforming what orchestras look like. But why did it take so long?
Consider the following image and compare squares A and B. What do you see?

Checkershadow illusion, part 1.

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Most people see square B as being lighter than square A. It turns out that this is an illusion. Your mind
made sense of the pattern it saw, a checkerboard. You put squares into categories, dark and light, and putthem in order: light squares next to dark squares. You may also have taken the shadow into account andmade sure it did not trick you into not seeing a pattern that you knew had to be there.

Consider the same checkerboard now,with square B isolated. Note that squares
A and B in fact have the same color. They
are both dark. By blocking some of thecheckerboard, we allowed your mind tosee square B for what it is—another darksquare. It no longer had to be in a certain
category and obey certain rules. It wasliberated from the patterns we expect, justas curtains liberated orchestra selectioncommittees.

Professionalmusicians

typically are quite shocked when theylearn how much they are influenced by

Checkershadow illusion, part 2.

visual cues. A recent series of experiments showed that competition judges consciously value sound as
central to their decision. Only the experimental evidence shows them that, in fact, they are instead
relying heavily on visual cues.
Consider another, quite different example. A study examining the parole rulings of Israeli judges foundthat they ruled far more leniently right after meal breaks. Differing degrees of leniency were the unintended
consequence of hunger, fatigue, the depletion of cognitive resources—and design. Just prior to taking abreak, the judges reverted to the easy solution: the status quo. After a break, they were more deliberative.
The timing and number of breaks the judges took—the design—had unintentional consequences. Bad
designs, whether consciously or unconsciously chosen, lead to bad outcomes. Bias is built into our practices
and procedures, not just into our minds. Here is our opportunity. […]Much like interior designers or landscape architects, behavioral designers create environments to help us
better achieve our goals. They do not define goals, but they help us get there. Referred to as “choicearchitecture” in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s path-breaking book Nudge, behavioral design goesbeyond law, regulation, or incentives, although it acknowledges that these are and will remain important.
But they do not always work. Based on 41 million observations for the population of Denmark, for example,

2023年度入試
research shows that tax subsidies have only a tiny impact on savings. Such incentives require people to takeaction and respond—which 85 percent of Danes fail to do. In contrast, behavioral designs that do not relyon people reacting to incentives but instead employ automatic mechanisms—such as automatic employer
contributions to retirement accounts—do much better. They substantially increased the amount of money
retirees have available. We do not always do what is best for ourselves, for our organizations, or for theworld—and sometimes, a little nudge can help. […]A few years ago I entered a day-care center at my workplace, Harvard University. I had our young son
in my arms. Like millions of parents who have taken their child to a caregiver for the first time, I was
extremely anxious. One of the first teachers I saw was—a man. I wanted to turn around and run. How could
I entrust this man with the most precious thing in my life? He did not conform to my expectation of what aloving, caring, and nurturing preschool teacher looked like. My reaction was not based on a conscious
thought process, but rather on something deep in my gut. Was I being sexist? I fear the answer is yes.
Thankfully, I overcame my biased snap judgment, the teacher proved great, and he became a trusted
caregiver. But to this day my gut reaction bothers me. Only about 10 to 20 percent of the elementary school
teachers in the United States and many other countries are male. These men face an uphill battle. Just as inorchestras, there is likely an untapped talent pool of elementary school teachers. What is more, society’sfailure to draw on that pool of talent matters. A 2015 study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operationand Development (OECD) finds that at age fifteen, boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to lack basic
proficiency in reading, mathematics, and science. The presence of male role models can impact what boys
believe possible and important for themselves: seeing is believing.
Stereotypes serve as heuristics—rules of thumb—that allow us to process information more easily, butthey are often inaccurate. What is worse, stereotypes describing how we believe the world to be often turninto prescriptions for what the world should be. Much psychological research shows that we cannot help butput people (and other observations) into categories. It rarely is a conscious thought process that informs ourthinking about demographic groups. Rather, when we learn the sex of a person, gender biases areautomatically activated, leading to unintentional and implicit discrimination.

Text source: Bohnet, Iris. 2016. What Works: Gender Equality by Design (pp. 1-7).
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Cambridge, MA: The