This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
Earlier this month, a man named Brian Chesky sent out an email that began like this.
At the heart of our mission, he wrote, is the idea that people are fundamentally good, and every community is a place where you can belong.
Chesky is the CEO and co founder of Airbnb, the online marketplace that connects travelers with people looking to rent their homes.
Chesky's email, sent to users across the globe, was a response to concerns about racial bias.
Some guests say they've experienced prejudice while trying to book rooms on Airbnb.
We first explored these complaints in the spring in an episode titled Airbnb while Black.
The host would always come up with excuses like, oh, someone actually just booked it.
But I got suspicious when I would check back like days later and see that those dates are still available.
Today, we're going to bring you that episode again with a few updates to reflect changes the company says it's making.
We'll begin not with Airbnb, but with another online platform.
You may have heard Facebook so a few months back, I was on Facebook when a friend request came in.
I don't have a great memory for faces and names, so I found myself trying to figure out if I had met this person somewhere.
But then at the back of my mind, I remembered a study.
It said my friendship choices on Facebook might be shaped by biases outside of my conscious awareness.
Michelle Hebel is a psychologist at Rice University who ran the Facebook study.
She designed fictitious Facebook profiles for two men and two women.
Both men were named Michael Davis.
Both women were Jennifer Davis.