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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 30-Oct-2026 02:17 ET (30-Oct-2026 06:17 GMT/UTC)
She’s the blonde bombshell and he’s her square-jawed sidekick. But nearly 70 years after the impossibly perfect Barbie and Ken made their debut, a new study from Adelaide University and the UNSW Sydney shows the iconic pair are finally looking a little more like the rest of us.
Every human has implicit biases, or involuntary associations about members of different social groups. But these biases are not fixed. Rather, they’re malleable reflections of our everyday experiences.
It’s harder to change the biases of people living in big cities, with millions of people, however, than it is to change the biases of people living in small cities, with around 150,000 residents, a new study shows. This is “the first strong proof of how contextual biases are,” says Andrew Stier, a Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute who performed the work.