The appropriate response time depends on what is being decided

When it comes to deciding who I will be working with I would rather take the time (hours/days/weeks) so that that we make a fair (un-baised) decision

As for deciding to whether to evade a baseball being thrown at my head, I would prefer the faster response time. It okay to be biased against fast moving projectiles :-)

Any time you deal with people you need take the time needed to eliminate any biases that are common to many humans

User story: Jane works in HR for $COMPANY. They have 10 places on the graduate scheme this summer, and have already received something like 800 applications. The boss wants a shortlist by Friday - they're going to read each one on the shortlist in detail and make a fair decision, but they're not going to spend half an hour on each one in the 800-pile because that would be 400 person-hours.

Of course, first you throw out the obviously bad ones - anyone who sent a word document when they clearly asked for PDF; anyone who doesn't have an engineering degree etc. etc. That still leaves you with 500.

What do you do? This is I suppose why implicit bias training exists, so you don't go "this one's from India, the last 10 from India couldn't even spell the company name right, reject".

(The next step in the UK is, reject everyone who doesn't have a first-class degree, if that still leaves you with a long enough shortlist. No wonder students are anxious about getting a first!)

Point I'm trying to make: there's situations in hiring where the time you can take is influenced by the volume of applications.

I think the parent was referring to survival instinct. Millions of years of evolution has lead to the need for fast pattern matching to avoid danger.