This
is a promising finding. It instructs us that racial bias is learned
early but it is clearly learned knowledge that can now be easily
modified. This is well worth doing at the school level to ensure
that it is eliminated.
It
also needs to be seen if tribal hatreds can also be so modified.
This type of thinking is prevalent everywhere and also needs to be
treated young. The same holds true for young Muslims where their
society teaches an us versus them mentality to start with and cannot
be simply eliminated by merely managing what is taught.
I
grew up listening to anti German discussions among my elders still
feeding of the propaganda of WWII. It was not particularly deep and
my own counter to it was that my father's origin was Carpathian
German although we did not use the language itself. That made me
pretty immune to that and similar teachings that I could have been
exposed to.
The
take home is that a protocol can be developed to eliminate irrational
biases taught when a child is young.
Weird Skin Color
Illusion Can Reduce Racism
Stephanie Pappas,
Here's a novel way to
reduce racism: Convince people their skin is darker than it really
is.
No need to break out
the tanning booth. A new study finds that an illusion that makes
people feel that a rubber hand is their own can make white people
less unconsciously biased against people with dark skin.
"It comes down to
a perceived similarity between white and dark skin," study
researcher Lara Maister, a psychologist at Royal Holloway University
of London, said in a statement. "The illusion creates an
overlap, which in turn helps to reduce negative attitudes because
participants see less difference between themselves and those with
dark skin."
The rubber hand
illusion is a classic psychology experiment in which a participant
sits at a table with his or her hand obscured by a screen. A rubber
hand is placed parallel to the person's own hand, where the
participant can see it. By stroking or touching the fake hand and the
person's real hand at the same time, a psychologist can make the
participant feel like the hand is part of their body.
Race and the rubber
hand
Maister and her
colleagues wanted to know if using a rubber hand in a dark skin tone
might influence the way white people perceived race. Previous studies
have found that people's brains activate to mirror actions they watch
other people doing; this effect is stronger when a person is watching
someone of his or her own race and weakens when they see someone of
another race.
Perhaps, the
researchers thought, if people came to see a limb with darker skin as
their own, they might perceive more overlap between themselves and
someone of another race. To test the idea, they first recruited 34
Caucasian students to take part in the rubber hand illusion.
Because racism is
generally frowned upon, psychologists can't always trust participants
to be upfront about (or even aware of) their biases in
questionnaires. To get around the problem, the researchers tested
their participants' implicit racial biases. The volunteers were shown
negative words, positive words and dark-skinned faces separately on a
computer screen. They had to categorize the words as either "good"
or "bad" by pressing a computer key.
The participants also
had to categorize the faces as "dark" by pressing a
computer key. In some cases, that key was the same one used to mark
good words. In other cases, the "dark" key was the same as
the one used to flag bad words.
Those who are more
racially biased are quicker at flagging dark faces and bad words when
the key for each is the same, and stumble more when they have to
associate "dark" with "good." It's a difficult
test to fool, given that it relies on millisecond-long delays and
minor errors that are tough to correct for.
Reducing racism
After a few rounds of
the implicit test to establish a baseline, the participants underwent
the rubber hand illusion for two minutes with a dark-skinned rubber
limb. Afterward, they were asked how strongly they felt the false
hand was their own. Then they took the implicit racial bias test
again.
The results
revealed that the stronger the feeling of ownership over the
dark-skinned hand, the less racially biased the participant was in
the second test — regardless of their scores on round one.
In a second
experiment, 69 more white participants completed the same tasks, but
this time, some did the rubber hand illusion with a white hand and
some with a dark hand. Again, ownership over the dark-skinned hand
led to less racial bias, while ownership over the light-skinned hand
changed nothing. The researchers reported their findings today (May
14) in the journal Cognition.
The researchers aren't
sure how the experiment would work if dark-skinned individuals were
made to feel a white hand was their own; the implicit racial bias
test used in the study has yet to turn up any widespread pattern of
unconscious racism against white people in other races. Another
measure of racial bias would have to be used.
Racial attitudes are
often formed young, study researcher Manos Tsakiris of Royal Holloway
University said in a statement. But biases aren't unchangeable, he
said.
"Our results show
that we can positively alter them by understanding how the brain is
processing sensory information from our bodies and that of others,"
Tsakiris said. "It will be interesting to replicate the effect
with different social groups and see if we can generalize these
findings outside of a laboratory setting."
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