Neuroscience
Most of us find that people from other races look more similar to each other than people from our own race - a phenomenon dubbed the 'other race effect'. Sophie Lebrecht and colleagues reasoned that this perceptual bias could feed into people's implicit, non-conscious racial stereotypes. Now in an exciting new study they've shown that training people to distinguish among other-race faces can help reduce implicit racism.
Twenty White participants completed a test of their implicit racism towards African American people. As expected, the participants were quicker at identifying a negative word after presentation of an African American face than they were at identifying a positive word.
Half the students then received training in discriminating among African American faces, after which they re-took the implicit racism test and showed significantly reduced evidence of implicit racism. The other students, who acted as control group, were exposed to as many African American faces in the training period, but received no practice at discriminating among them. On re-testing, their implicit racism was unchanged.
The finding suggests that by improving people's ability to discriminate among other-race faces, their implicit racial biases can be reduced. This makes intuitive sense. After all, if people from a given race all seem to look alike, then it's not so hard to believe that they are similar in other ways too. In contrast, learning to see the visible differences between people of another race, makes it harder to lump them altogether in social and cultural ways.
"Our findings have great potential for how we understand and address the real-world consequences of racial stereotyping," the researchers said.
_________________________________
Sophie Lebrecht, Lara J. Pierce, Michael J. Tarr, James W. Tanaka (2009). Perceptual Other-Race Training Reduces Implicit Racial Bias. PLoS ONE, 4 (1) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004215
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Learning to distinguish between other-race faces could help beat racism
Most of us find that people from other races look more similar to each other than people from our own race - a phenomenon dubbed the 'other race effect'. Sophie Lebrecht and colleagues reasoned that this perceptual bias could feed into people's implicit, non-conscious racial stereotypes. Now in an exciting new study they've shown that training people to distinguish among other-race faces can help reduce implicit racism.Twenty White participants completed a test of their implicit racism towards African American people. As expected, the participants were quicker at identifying a negative word after presentation of an African American face than they were at identifying a positive word.
Half the students then received training in discriminating among African American faces, after which they re-took the implicit racism test and showed significantly reduced evidence of implicit racism. The other students, who acted as control group, were exposed to as many African American faces in the training period, but received no practice at discriminating among them. On re-testing, their implicit racism was unchanged.
The finding suggests that by improving people's ability to discriminate among other-race faces, their implicit racial biases can be reduced. This makes intuitive sense. After all, if people from a given race all seem to look alike, then it's not so hard to believe that they are similar in other ways too. In contrast, learning to see the visible differences between people of another race, makes it harder to lump them altogether in social and cultural ways.
"Our findings have great potential for how we understand and address the real-world consequences of racial stereotyping," the researchers said.
_________________________________
Sophie Lebrecht, Lara J. Pierce, Michael J. Tarr, James W. Tanaka (2009). Perceptual Other-Race Training Reduces Implicit Racial Bias. PLoS ONE, 4 (1) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004215Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- You Don't Have To Be Well-educated To Be An ‘aversive Racist’, But It Helps
Are you a racist? Most likely, your answer is no – and perhaps you find the very notion offensive. But according to two Cardiff University psychologists, Kuppens and Spears, many educated people harbor prejudiced attitudes even though they deny it....
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Richard Dawkins called it "the curse of the discontinuous mind" - our tendency to lump things into discrete categories. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our perception of ethnic races, which we tend to see as reflecting absolute dividing lines in...
- How Ambiguous Racism Can Be More Harmful Than The Blatant Variety
Ambiguous racism is more detrimental to African American students’ performance on a mental task than is blatant racism, psychologists have shown. By contrast, the reverse is true for White students, for whom blatant racism is more distracting. Jessica...
- No Room For Prejudice
Students’ racial prejudice is reduced when they share their university accommodation with roommates from a different ethnic group. Colette Van Laar at Leiden University in The Netherlands and her American colleagues measured the racial prejudice of...
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SFCG on Race Intern (54263) Search for Common Ground - Washington DCPosition Type: Internship (Fall or Spring Part-Time) Description: SFCG on Race is seeking an intern to support the work of developing projects within the program. SFCG on Race, or “The...