Neuroscience of Racism
In our fifth episode of the Brain Blown Podcast, we introduce you to our most requested topic of the season: the neuroscience of racism.
From the kitchen table to the senate floor, racism is being talked about constantly. So where does racism come from? And why do these racist acts of violence happen - and continue to happen - so frequently?
In this episode we'll review questions like:
What is racism?
What is racism from a neurological level?
What's going on in our brains that causes us to feel and act differently around people of a different race?
And what can we do to change that?
Laine shares the facts from scientists like Robert Sapolsky, Bruce Perry, Manie Bosman, JT Kobuta, Elizabeth Phelps, and Andreas Ollson from NYU who've done extensive research, as well as findings from implicit bias tests and futsal form recognition tests. (See our resource list below for direct links.)
**At the end of the episode, we've added a special interview with friend Kiara Lewis who discusses more from the book My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem.
Time Stamps:
1:25 - Intro
9:25 - Why are we talking about this?
10:55 - What is it: what does racism look like in our brains?
14:39 - Conditioned vs. ideological racism and the implicit bias test
22:34 - What is our fusiform and how is it involved? (Or not involved?)
26:51 - How these held racial tendencies in our brains have deadly consequences
30:05 - Why it happens; the importance of P-200 and N-200 waveforms and making rational decisions
33:44 - Our brain on shortcuts
36:19 - Why should we care? What do we all have in common, and how is it impacting all of us?
45:15 - What do we do about it?
50:51 - Awareness matters - your beliefs and values don’t always drive your behavior
53:23 - How "us vs. them" changes constantly
56:25 - Interview with Kiara
Resources
Books:
My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem
What Happened To You by Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey
Articles:
JT Kobuta: “The Neuroscience of Race”
N Kanwisher, G Yove: “The fusiform face area”
AJ Golby, JDE Gabrieli: “Differential responses in the fusiform region to same-race and other-race faces“
K Shutts, KD Kinzler: “An Ambiguous-Race Illusion in Children's Face Memory”
A Avenantie: “racial bias reduces empathic sensorimotor resonance with other-race pain”
J Correll: “Event-related potentials and the decision to shoot”
J Eberhartd: “Seeing Black”
General Outline of Episode
Neuroscience of Empathy - To survive we have to survive in groups - and we live in a world where most other things are faster, stronger, and deadlier than we are
how to be in groups and the value of that - what are the side effects of trying to live in a world where living in groups is needed and everything is better at killing you
Steven Porages - brain gives the body tools to do with situations and surrounding but because safe so many tools are wrong - our system is wired to keep us safe - had to be wired for both connection and safety - and humans are often unsafe - number one predator of humans (outside of mosquitoes) for x length of time has been humans for multiple millennia
Mapping of our brains - brains are not super smart all the time
Bruce Perry - An infant's brain takes in sensory information to make sense of their world and build associations. We are deeply relational creatures whose developing brains starting with the lowest area begin to make memories of smells sounds and images of our people. These memories exist on a very deep pre cortical unconscious level the way your people talk the way they dress the color of their skin. now, remember that your brain is always monitoring your world both inside and outside to ensure your survival. And when the brain encounters any unfamiliar experiences, its default move is to activate the stress response. Better to be safe than sorry better to assume that novelty can be a potential threat period now add to this fact that the major predator of humans has always been other humans. our stress responses evolved to be relationally sensitive, such that when we are with people who have attributes similar to our childhood clan we feel safe. But when we encounter people with attributes that are different from our people the brain's default is to activate the stress response when that happens we feel dysregulated even threatened.
Why are we talking about this
In an article in Forbes written 6 months ago by Janice Grassam - “for the last two years conversations about race, racism and critical race theory have intensified in frequency. The murder of George Floyd two years ago this month sparked a global shift”
From conversations over a family dinner to the floor of the Senate when discussing supreme court justice nominations, conversations about race and racism are happening all around us. So we wanted to ask the question - what does this mean through the lens of neuroscience.
This is the neuroscience of Racism.
What is it?
Two Different Types of Racism -
Boseman
Ideological racism or explicit or overt racism - is based on the conscious belief that race is the most important determinant of human traits and abilities
Condition Racism - implicit, subconscious, or covert - others might call this implicit bias
Elizabeth Phelps and Andreas Ollson, Neuroscientists from New York University
extensive research on the neuroscience of racism
propose that “millennia of natural selection and a lifetime of social learning may predispose humans to fear those who seem different from them”
Boseman argues this seems key to conditioned racism.
Boseman
Two major underpinning factors for conditioned racism.
Neuroscience of safety - try to quickly (often wrongly) identify threat - which (from Brian Mapping) brain organizes for quicker identification later - labels something/someone as a threat. Boseman argues this is why someone from a different race can trigger an automated threat response even if it is completely unwarranted.
Brain’s tendency to identify people of another race as a threat can be “amplified and reinforced by fear conditioning, which is a socially learnt process.”
Perry
When we first meet a person different than other people we have known we categorize the difference.
“Our world includes a new person”
Our “brain will sort, compare, and categorize this person” starting with existing defaults or how this person is similar/different from ourselves or people we already know
More time = more nuanced associations.
“You get to know the facets and complexities of the person, not simply their categories”
However, our brain loves some shortcuts!
The brain wants to respond fast
The faster, the less accurate
Makes us vulnerable to stereotypes and isms - because we are “generalizing attributes of people based upon the broad categories that they fall into”
Our first experiences usually early in life are the most powerful and enduring.
What is racism on a neuroscience level?
How our brain responds to other-race faces and how this impacts our actions
Sapolsky - Behave: The biology of Humans at our Best and Worst
- stick your average person in a brain scanner and show him a picture of another race for only 1/10 of a second.
this is too fast for him to be aware of what he saw.
Brain loves shortcuts - Brain Mapping - we see and react to things before we know what they are (stick/snake)
In an image too fast for us to say what it was - amygdala activates - natural fear response.
J Kuboto - the neuroscience of race
Flash a face for less than 100 milliseconds
so short a time that people aren't even sure they've seen something
However, if they guess - better than half of the time, they are the right chance of accuracy.
This has been a widely replicated study
T Ito and G. J Urland -The more Ideological racism or explicit or overt racism - the more activation there is (as tested by an implicit bias test)
Sapolsky “We may claim to judge someone by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. But our brains sure as hell note the color, real fast.
- Similarly repeatedly show subjects a picture of a face accompanied by a shock soon seeing the face alone activates the amygdala.A Olsson As shown by Elizabeth Phelps of NYU such fear conditioning occurs faster for other races than for same-race faces. Amygdala are prepared to learn to associate something bad with them.
J. Richardson -fmri investigation
People judge neutral other-race faces as angrier than neutral same-race faces.
N. Kanwisher
Race not only impacts our amygdala but also our fusiform face area, the cortical region that specializes in facial recognition.
Prosopagnosia or face blindness is a rulst of damage to this area
John Gabrielli at MIT demonstrates
less visible form activation for other-race faces, with the effect strongest in the most implicit racist subjects.
To test if this was just a question of a new face the study also made sure to show a face with purple skin
fusiform responses if it's the same race face.
Sapolsky - its not fooled, it knows you just photoshopped that face
K. Shutts and K. Kinzler
white Americans remember white better than black faces, moreover, mixed-race faces are remembered better if described as being white rather than a black person.
If mixed-race faces are told they've been assigned to one of two races for the study they show less fusiform responses to faces of the arbitrary designated other race.
A. Avenantie “racial bias reduces empathic sensorimotor resonance with other-race pain”
Empathy - if a person sees a video of someone's hands being poked with a needle = have an isomorphic sensorimotor response
hands tense in empathy.
Among both blacks and whites, the responses blunted for other race hands
more implicit racism = the more blunting.
Both races, there is more activation of the emotional medial prefrontal cortex when considering misfortune befalling a member of their own race than of any other race.
Joshua Correll 20120 study at University of Colorado - hierarchy of bias in split decisions
69 students and 254 police officers deciding what figures posed a threat -
Subjects in a study were repeatedly played a first-person shooter game and saw images of people holding either a gun or a benign object like a cell phone- they were told to respond “shoot” only those holding guns.
Participants were faster to shoot armed Black targets than armed White targets, and they were faster to decide not to shoot unarmed White targets than unarmed Blacks
Most like to shoot incorrectly (someone holding a cell phone
black, then Latino, then white, then Asian
1999 Amadou Diallo. Diallo, a West African immigrant in New York matched a description of a rapist 4 white officers questioned him and when unarmed Diallo started to pull out his wallet they decided It was a gun and fired 41 shots.
Office Rosfelt in Pittsburgh in 2017 who shot unarmed Antwon Rose stating “I thought one of them was pointing a weapon at me” “my intent was to end the threat that was made at me. I just wanted to end the threat to me” .
Or the 2020 killing of Andre Hill who was shot by officer Adam Coy because Coy thought he had a weapon and Antwon Rose was found holding a cell phone in his hand.
Since 2015, police officers have fatally shot at least 135 unarmed Black men and women nationwide, an NPR investigation has found. NPR reviewed police, court and other records to examine the details of the cases. At least 75% of the officers were white.
Why is this -
J Correl
Used an EEG to assess the brain on what are called “Event-related protocols” and these are things that create “stimulus-induced changes in electrical activity” to the brain
Threatening faces show a distinct change - called a P200 component
in the event-related protocol waveform in under 200 milliseconds
Among white subjects seeing a black person evokes a stronger P200 waveform than seeing a white person does
This is regardless of being associated with threat - such as viewing someone armed
A few milliseconds later the second inhibitory waveform- n200 component appears,
This n200 is originated in the frontal cortex.
Sapolsky “So in other words let's think for a second about what we're seeing before we shoot.”
Among white subjects seeing a black person evokes less of an n200 waveform than does seeing someone white.
So for a white person viewing a black person
greater the P200/n200 ratio
the greater the ratio of I'm feeling threatened to hold on a second, the greater the likelihood of shooting an armed black individual.
Sapolosky
Our brain loves shortcuts - especially as we learned in the science of safety -sensory information to the amygdala
“Most of it is funneled through that sensory way station in the thalamus and then to the appropriate cortical regions IE the visual or auditory cortex for the slow arduous process of decoding light pixels sound waves and so on into something identifiable. Finally the information about it it's Mozart is passed to the limbic system. As we saw there's a shortcut from the thalamus directly to the amygdala such that well the first few layers of say the visual cortex are fooling around with unpacking a complex image the amygdala is already thinking that's a gun and reacting. As we saw there's the tradeoff information reaches the amygdala fast but is often inaccurate. The amygdala thinks it knows what it's seeing before the frontal cortex slams on the brakes, an innocent man reaches for his wallet and dies.”
The article Event-related potentials and the decision to shoot: the role of threat perception and cognitive control.
subjects had to identify objects from partial pictures
If a white person subliminally saw a black person - that subject then tested higher at being able to detect an image of a weapon but not a benign image like a camera or a book
J. Eberhartd“see black: race, crime and visual processing”
The more stereotypical African facial features the longer the sentence
However a black male defendants wears big clunky glasses - viewed more favorable
nerd defense
Defense attorneys have given black defendants fake glasses -prosecuting attorneys ask whether those dark glasses are real.
Chad Forbes at the University of Delaware
amygdala activation increases if loud rap music is playing
James Lang's theory was named for William James a grand Murphy die in the history of psychology and an obscure Danish physician coral lane. In the 1880s they independently concocted the same idea. How do your feelings in your body's autonomic functions react? It seemed obvious a lion chases you you feel terrified in this your heart rate speeds up. James and Lange suggested the opposite you subliminally note the lions speeding up your heart then your conscious brain gets this interceptive information, concluding wow my heart my tracing I must be terrified. In other words you decide what you feel based on signals for your body. Nonetheless, interceptive information influence if not determines our emotions. Some brain regions with starring roles in processing social emotions the Pfc, insular cortex, anterior singular cortex, and amygdala received lots of interceptive information. This helps explain a reliable trigger of aggression, namely pain, which activates most of these regions. As a repeating theme pain does not cause aggression, it amplifies the pre-existing tendencies towards aggression. In other words, pain makes aggressive people more aggressive while doing the opposite to unaggressive individuals
In the minutes before a behavior is triggered subtler things such as sights and smells gas pain and choice of words unconsciously influence us. In one study subjects filling out a questionnaire or express stronger eagle Talon principles if there was an American flag in the room period in another study of spectators at an English football matches a researcher planted in the cloud slips, seeming to injure his ankle. Does anyone help him? If the plant or the homes team shirt he received more help than when he wore a neutral sweatshirt or one of the opposing team. Another study involved a subtle group membership manipulation for a number of days pairs of conservatively dressed Hispanics did a train station during rush hour in predominantly white Boston suburbs, conversing quietly in Spanish. The consequence? White commuters expressed more negative exclusionary attitude towards Hispanics but not other immigrants. Conscious judgment about thumbs are unconsciously manipulated in the real world. Morning commuters filled out a questionnaire about political views. Then at half the stations a pair of young Mexicans conservatively dressed appeared each morning for two weeks chatting quietly in Spanish before boarding the train. Then commuters filled out second questionnaires. Remarkably the presence of such pairs made people more supportive of decreasing legal immigration from Mexico and making English the official language, and more opposed to amnesty for illegal immigrants. The manipulation was selective, not changing attitudes about Asian Americans African Americans or Middle Eastern's .
When women are ovulating, there fusiform areas respond more to faces with the emotional VMP responding more to men's faces in particular. Carlos Navarrete at Michigan State University has shown that white women well ovulating have more negative attitudes towards African American men. 38 Thus the intensity of us theming is being modulated by hormones. Our feelings about them can be shaped by subterranean forces we haven't even a clue about. During the 2008 election series subjects were presented with swatches of different shades of brown and were asked to more accurately match Obama's skin color. Women who viewed him as more white were likely to vote for him during their time of ablation, women who viewed him as more black showed the opposite period of note these are small effects. Select abilities in the eye or the hormone status of the beholder
Karsten de drew of the University of Amsterdam
oxytocin can impact race
Male subjects in two teams
each subject had to choose how much of his money to put in the pot to share with his teammates.
oxytocin increased generosity.
Then participants played the prisoners dilemma with someone from another team.
When the financial stakes were high making subjects more motivated, oxytocin made them more likely to preemptively stab the other player in the back.
Oxytocin makes you more pro social to people like you but spontaneously lousy to others who are a threat.
Second study Dutch students subjects took an implicit association test of unconscious bias. And oxytocin exaggerated biases against to outgroups namely Middle Eastern and Germans.
Subjects had to decide whether it was OK to kill one person in order to save five. Potential people to kill had Dutch or German or Middle Eastern names, the five people in danger were unamed.
Remarkably oxytocin made the subjects less likely to sacrifice a Dutch or German person rather than a Middle Eastern person.
Oxytocin the love hormone makes us more pro social to us and whereas to everyone else this is not genetic prosociality this is ethnocentrism and xenophobia. In other words the actions of these neuropeptides depend dramatically on context who you are your environment and who that person is.
Our brains form us then dichotomies with stunning speed.2 As discussed 50 millisecond exposure to the face of someone of another race activates the amygdala, while failing to activate the fusiform face area as much as same race faces do all within a few hundred milliseconds. Similarly the brain groups faces by gender or social status roughly the same speed. Race, automatic bias against them can be demonstrated with a fiendishly clever implicit association test.3 “Suppose you are unconsciously biased against trolls period to simplify the IAT enormously a computer screen flashes either pictures of humans or trolls or words with positive connotations for example honest or negative ones for example deceitful. Sometimes the rule is if you see a human or a positive term press the red button, if it's a troll or a negative term, press the blue button. And sometimes it's human or negative term, press red, troll or positive term, press blue. Because of your anti-troll biased pairing a troll with a positive term or a human with a negative it is discordant and distracting. Thus you pause for a few milliseconds before pressing a button. It's automatic you're not fuming about clannish troll business practices or troll brutality in the battle of somewhere in 1523. You're processing words and pictures, and unconsciously you pause stopping by the dissonance linking trolls and lovely or humans and murderous. Run enough rounds in the pattern of delay emerges revealing your bias. The brain's fault lines dividing us from them were shown in the discussion of oxytocin. Recall how the hormone prompts trust generosity and cooperation towards an OS but crappier behavior towards them, more preemptive aggression in economic play, more adversity in sacrificing them but not us for the greater good. Oxytocin exaggerates us/them.”
Kids
three to four kids group people of race and gender,
more negative views of them, perceive other-race faces as being angrier than same-race faces.8 And even earlier period infants learn same-race faces better than other-race faces. How can you tell? Show an infant a picture of someone repeatedly she looks at it last each time period now show a different face if she can't tell the two apart she barely glances at it. But if it's recognized as being new there's excitement and longer looking.9 Four important thoughts about kids dichotomizing. are children learning these prejudices from their parents? Not necessarily. Kids grow in environments whose nonrandom stimuli it actively paved the way for dichotomizing. If an infant sees of only one skin color, the salient thing about the first face with a different skin color will be the skin color. Racial dichotomies are formed during the crucial development. As evidence children adopted before age 8 by someone of a different race developed the expertise at face recognition of the adoptive parent's race. Kids learn dichotomies in the absence of ill intent. When a kindergarten teacher says good morning boys and girls, the kids are being taught that dividing the world that way is more meaningful than saying good morning those of you who have lasted tooth and those who haven't yet. It's everywhere from she and he meaning different things to those languages so taken with gender dichotomizing that inanimate objects are given honorary gonads.Racial us theming can seem in deliberately entrenched in kids because of the parents most intent on preventing it are often lousy at it. As studies show liberals are typically uncomfortable discussing race with their children. Instead, they counter the lure of us theming with abstractions that means squat to kids it's wonderful that everyone can be friends or Barney is purple and we love Barney. Thus the strength of us theming is shown by the speed and minimal sensory stimuli required for the brain to process group differences, the unconscious optimacy of such processes, its presence in other primates and very young humans, and the tendency to group according to arbitrary differences and imbues those markers with power.
Just as we view us in standard ways there are patterns in how we view them. A consistent one is viewing them as threatening angry or untrustworthy. Take space aliens in a movie, and interesting example. In the analysis of nearly 100 pertinent movies starting with Georges metalis pioneering 1902 a trip to the moon, nearly 80% present aliens as manipulant, with the remainder being either benevolent or neutral. In economic games people implicitly treat members of other races as less trustworthy or reciprocating. White judge African American faces angrier than white faces, and racially ambiguous faces with angry expressions are more likely to be categorized as other race. White subjects become more likely to support juvenile criminals being tried as an adult when primed to think about blacks versus white offenders. And the unconscious sense of them as menacing can be remarkably abstract baseball fans tend to underestimate the distance to a rival team stadium, while Americans hostile to Mexican immigrants underestimate the distance to Mexico city. But them's do not evoke a sense of menace, sometimes it's disgust. Back to their insular cortex, which in most animals is about go story discussed, biting into rotten food, but whose human portfolio includes moral and aesthetic disgust. Pictures of drug addicts or homeless typically activate the insula not the amygdala. Being disgusted by another group abstract beliefs isn't naturally the role of the insula, which evolved to care about disgusting taste and smells. Ask them markers provide a stepping stone. Feeling disgusted by them because they eat repulsive sacred or adorable things, slather themselves with rancid cents, dress and scandalous ways these things are that the insula can seek its teeth into. Paul Rosen of the University of Pennsylvania, discussed serves as an ethnic or outgroup marker. Establishing that they eat disgusting things provides momentum for deciding that they also have disgusting ideas about say ethics.
“Racial differences which have only relatively recently emerged, are of little esteem significance. For the hunter-gatherers of human history, the most different person you'd ever encounter in your life came from perhaps a couple of dozen miles away, while the nearest person of a different race lived 1000 miles away, there's no evolution legacy of humans encountering people With remarkable different skin color. Furthermore, the notion of race is a fixed biological-based classification system doesn't work either. At various times in history EU S census, Mexican and Armenian were classified as distinct races, southern Italians were of a different race than northern Europeans, someone with one black great grandparent and seven white ones was classified as white in Oregon but not in Florida. This is race as a cultural rather than biological construct.48 Given facts like these it's not surprising that a racial ask them dickota me are frequently trumped by other classifications. The most frequent is gender. Recall the finding that it is more difficult to extinguish a condition fear associated with rather than same race face. Never add has shown that this occurs only when the condition of faces are male, gender outweighs race as an automatic classification in this case. Age as a classification readily Trump's race as well. Even occupation can, for example in one study white subjects were shown an automatic preference for white politicians over black athletes when they were primed to think of race, but the opposite when primed to think of occupation. Race as a salient us them category can be shoved aside by settler reclassification. In one study subject shop pictures of individuals, either black or white, either each associated with a statement, and then had to recall which face went with what statement. There was an automatic racial categorization 50 if subjects misattributed quote the face picked and the one actually associated with the statement were more likely to be of the same race. Next half the black and half the white individuals pictured more the most distinct yellow shirt the other half for Gray period now subjects were most confused by faces of shirt color. Wonderful research by Mary Wheeler and Susan Fiskie of Princeton showed how categorization is shifted, studying the phenomenon of the amygdala activation in pictures of other race faces. In one group subjects tried to find a distinctive dot in each picture. In another raceface didn't activate the amygdala51 faceless wasn't being processed. In the second group subjects were judged whether each phase looked older then some age. Amygdaloid responses to other race faces enlarged thinking categorically about age strengthened thinking categorically about race. And a third group of vegetable was displayed before each face, subjects judged whether the person liked that vegetable. The amygdala didn't respond to the other race faces. At least two interpretations come to mind to explain the last results a distinction. Subjects were too busy thinking about say carrots to do an automatic categorization by race. This would resemble the effect of searching for the dot. Recategorization. You look at them face, thinking about what food they'd like. You picture that person shopping ordering meal at a restaurant, sitting down at dinner at home, and enjoying particular food. In other words you think about the person as an individual. This is the readily accepted interpretation.
Cognitive load: wary taxing frontal executive task diminishes a performance on a subsequent frontal task. This occurs with us slash theming. White subjects do better uncertain behavioral tests when the tester is white as opposed to black, subjects whose performance declines must dramatically in the latter scenario show the greatest D1 Pfc activation when viewing other race faces. J Dovidido “why can’t we all just get along? interpersonal basis and interracial distrust) The cognitive load generated by the frontal executive control during interracial interactions can be modulated. If white subjects are told most people are prejudice more prejudice than they think they are, before taking a test with the black tester, performance plummets then if they are told most people perform worse on a frontal cortical cognition test than they think that it. Moreover, if white subjects are primed with command reeking of frontal regulation avoid pressure stirring and interact racial interaction, performance declines more when they are told to have a positive intercultural exchange. J. Richardson - a fmri investigation of the impact of interracial contact on executive functioning. A different type of executive control can occur in minority thems when dealing with individuals of dominant culture, be certain to interact with them in a positive manner to counter the assumed prejudice against you. In one startling study African American subjects were primed to think about either race or age prejudice, followed by an interaction with somebody white. When prime was Rachel, subjects became more talkative, solicited other opinions more, smiled more, and lean more forward, the same subject did not occur when the subjects interacted with other African Americans. Two points are worth making about these studies with executive control and interactions with EMS. Frontal cortical activation during an interracial interaction could reflect a being prejudice and trying to hide it be being prejudice and feeling bad about it see feeling no prejudice and working to communicate that D who knows what else. Activation merely implies that the interracial nature of the interaction is weighing on the subject implicitly or otherwise in prompting executive control.
The multiple stems dichotomies we carry and the ease of shifting their priority, shifting automatic characterizations by race to categorizing by shirt color, to manipulating math performance by emphasizing easier racer ethnicity. Shifting which categorization is at the forefront isn't necessarily a great thing and then may consist of six to one half dozen of another, for example among European American men a photograph of an Asian woman applying makeup makes gender automatically stronger than ethnicity on automaticity, well a picture of her using chopsticks as the opposite. More effective than getting people to shift at them one category into a million other type of them of course is to shift the them into being a perceived as an us emphasizing attributes in common. C macrae In the 1950s the psychologist Gordon alpert proposed contact theory. An inaccurate version if you bring us is and them together say teenagers from two hostile nations brought together in the summer camp animosities disappear, similarities became the most important that differences, and everyone becomes an OS. More accurate version, put us as and thumbs together under very narrow circumstances and something sort of resembling that happens but you can also blow it up and worsen things. Some of these effects narrow circumstances, there are roughly equal numbers from each side, each one is treated equally and ambiguously, contact is lengthy and on neutral benevolent territory, there are supporting and goals where everyone works together on a task they care about. Them's tend to be viewed as homogeneous simple and having an unchangeable and negative essence. Them as an individual can make them seem more like an us. Decreasing essentialist thinking via individualization is a powerful tool. One elegant study showed this. White subjects were given a questionnaire assessing the extent of their acceptance of racial inequities, after being given two primes. The first bolstered essentialist thinking about race as invariant and homogeneous scientists pinpoint the genetic underpinnings of race. The other prime was anti essentialist scientists review that race has no genetic bias. Being primed tord essentialists it made subjects more accepting of racial inequalities M.J Williams and J. L. Eberhardt
Individual differences in how people feel about a hierarchy help explain variations and extent of theming. This has shown in studies examining social dominance ordination how much someone values prestige in power, and right wing authoritarianism how much someone values central sized authority the rule of law and convection. High social dominance orientation individuals show the greatest increases in automatic prejudices when feeling threatened, more acceptance of biased against low status out groups of male, more tolerance of sexism. And as discussed people high in sdo and RWA are less bothered by hostile humor in outgroups. Related to our all being part of multiple aesthetic otomis is our simultaneous membership in multiple hierarchies. No surprise people emphasize the importance of the hierarchy in which they rank the highest being captain of the companies weekend softball team takes more significance than the lousy lowly 9 to 5 job during the week. Particularly interesting our hierarchies that tend to map into an us them category for example when race and ethnicity overlap heavily with social and economic status. In those cases those on the top ten emphasize the convergence of hierarchies in the importance of simulation of values in the core hierarchy. Why can't they all just call themselves Americans instead of ethnicity Americans. Interestingly this is a local phenomenon, whites tend to favor a similar Unitarian adherence to national values while African Americans favor more of a pluralism, however the opposite occurs when concerning campus life and policies among white and African American students are traditionally black universities. We can keep two contradictory things in our head at the same time if it works to our benefit.
The context-dependency of morality is crucial in an additional realm. It is a nightmare of a person who, with remorseless sociopathy, he leaves it's OK to steal rape kill and plunder. But far more if humanity's worse behaviors are due to a different kind of person, namely most of the rest of us, who will say of course it is wrong to do X but here is why these special circumstances make me an exception right now. We use different brain circuits when contemplating our own moral failings heavy activation on the VM versus those of others more of the insula and D1 Pfc.4 And we consistently make different judgments being more likely to exempt ourselves than others from moral condemnation. Why? Part of it is simply self-serving, sometimes a hypocrite bleeds because you scratched a hypocrite. The difference may also reflect different emotions being involved when we analyze our own actions versus those of others. Considering the moral link failings of the latter may evoke anger and indignation, well their moral triumphs prompt emulation and inspiration. In contrast, considering our own moral failings calls forth shame and guilt, whereas triumphs elicit pride. R Zahn - neural basis of human social values, evidence from functional mri
Intergroup contact worsens when the two groups are treated unequally or are unequal in number, where the smaller group is surrounded, where the intergroup boundaries are ambiguous, where the group is via to display symbols of their sacred values. Elbows are rubbed raw. Obviously, the opposite is needed to minimize threatened anxiety groups encountering each other in equal numbers and treatment, and a neutral setting free of agenda prop and where there's institutional oversight of the venture. Most important interactions work best when there is a shared goal, specifically when it is successful. Under those conditions, sustained intergroup contact generally decreases prejudices, often to a large extent and in a generalized persistent manner. This was conclusive with the 2006 meta-analysis of sub 500 studies comprising over 250,000 subjects from 8038 countries, beneficial effects were roughly equal for group differences in race religion ethnicity and sexual orientation period as example in a 1957 study concerning the desegregation of the merchant marines showed that more trips white cement took with African Americans, the more positive their racial attitudes. Same for white cops as a fraction of time spent with African American partners. As shown by a study by T Pettigrea and L Tropp ‘ a meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory) A more recent meta-analysis provides additional insight. The beneficial effects typically involved both more knowledge about and more empathy for them. The workplace is a particularly effective place for contact to decrease prejudice at work often generalizes to them at large and sometimes even to other types of them. Contact between traditionally dominant groups and a subordinate minority usually decreases prejudice in more of the former, the latter having higher threshold. Novel routes have interaction such as sustained online relationships can work about as well
One of the strangest things humans do is forgive. For starters forgive is not forgetting. If nothing else it's neurobiologically unlikely. A rat learns to associate a bell with a shock and freezes when it hears it. When the next day the bell repeatedly sounds without being accompanied by a shock, causing the freezing behavior to extinguish, the memory trace of that learning does not evaporate. Instead, it's overlaid with new learning today that bell is not bad news. As proof, suppose the day after that, the bell again signals a shock. If the initial learning of bell will shock has been erased it would take as long as this data learn the association as it did the first period instead there's rapid requisite position bell equals shock again. Forgiving someone doesn't mean you forgot what they did. There is a subset of victims who claim that to have forgiveness the perpetrator relinquishes their anger and desire for punishment period I include the word claim not to imply skepticism but to indicate that forgiveness is a self-reported state that being can be claimed but not proven. Forgiveness can occur as a religious imperative. In June 2015 Charleston church massacre, white supremacist Dylann Roof killed 9 perishers in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church period two days later at roofs arraignment stunningly family members of the dead were there to forgive him and pray for his soul. Forgiveness can take exemplary cognitive reappraisal. Consider the case of Jennifer Thompson Canio and Ronald cotton. In 1984 Thompson Canio was raped by a stranger. In a police lineup she identified cotton with great certainty, despite claiming innocence, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In the years after friends tentatively wondered if she could put the nightmare behind her like Hal I would be able to with her response. She was consumed with her hatred for Cotton with her desire to harm him. And then more than ten years into his prison sentence DNA evidence exonerated Cotton. Another man had done it he was incarcerated in prison for other rapes and bragged about getting away with this one. Thompson Canio had identified the wrong man and convicted a jury. Issues of hatred or forgiveness were now on the other foot. When they finally met after Cotton's release and pardon Thompson Canio said if I spend every minute of every hour of every day for the rest of my life telling you I'm sorry can you ever forgive me? And Cotton said Jennifer I forgave you years ago. His inability to do so involved profound reappraisal. I forgave Jennifer for picking me up on that line up as her rapist took less time than people think. I knew she was a victim and was hurting real bad we were the victims of the same injustice by the same man and this gave us a common ground to stand upon. A complete reappraisal that made them us in their victimhood. The two now lecture together about a need for judicial reform.
The key role that fear plays in conditioned racism was more recently confirmed in research at Oxford University in the UK involving 36 Caucasian students. Half the participants were given a dose of propranolol– a drug used for the treatment of hypertension, anxiety and panic – and the rest were given a placebo which looked just like propranolol. The students then took the Implicit Attitude Test which measures implicit and often hidden negative attitudes towards social outgroups such as another race. The results showed that the students who had taken the propranolol scored considerably lower for conditioned or subconscious racism. The explanation for this somewhat strange outcome: propranol is a beta blocker which inhibits the action of adrenaline and other stress hormones on the sympathetic nervous system which, as we know by now, mediates the fight-or- flight response. By inhibiting the students’ autonomous fear reaction, the drug significantly reduced their conditioned racial bias
Adam Chekroud - a 2014 review of neuroimaging studies investigating the “neural correlates of prejudice” suggests, once again, that the amygdala is of high importance.184 The study goes further to argue that activity in this area of the brain may be attributed to a person perceiving a threat that arises from negative cultural associations with black men and other groups.
In 2000, Elizabeth Phelps and Mahzarin Banaji collaborated on one of the first studies combining fMRI with the IAT.41 In language that would soon become the typical frame for these sorts of studies, they purported to use fMRI “to explore the neural substrates involved in the unconscious evaluation of Black and White social groups.”42 Using the fMRI to focus on the amygdala while subjects were taking an IAT, they first showed “White Americans” pictures of the faces of “unfamiliar Black and White Males,” and found that “the strength of amygdala activation to Blackversus-White faces was correlated” with IAT responses. In a second experiment, they did not find similar responses when the stimulus faces “belonged to familiar and positively regarded Black and White individuals.” The researchers were primarily concerned to show a correlation between indirect measures of bias, such as the IAT and fMRI imaging. But the underlying frame to the study is what really matters here. Studies such as this opened the door to the idea of “neural substrates” to racism. This becomes the main theme of follow-up studies that continue to proliferate today. They all assume that there are neural substrates or neural correlates to something we call racism and that using sophisticated technological interventions, such as fMRI, we can observe “racism” as a physiological phenomenon manifested in distinct regions of the brain.
Kuboto - neuroscicen of race
Another brain region that has often been reported in neuroimaging studies of race is the dorsal ACC. Neuroscientists generally observe activation of the dorsal ACC when individuals experience conflict between prepotent and intentional response tendencies, including those elicited using cognitive control tasks such as the Stroop and Ericksen flanker tasks. It has been proposed that the ACC is involved in monitoring for response competition and, once a conflict is detected, serves to engage executive control35. In the race context, conflict between automatic, prepotent feelings and conscious intentions to respond fairly may explain the involvement of the ACC. Equality norms in American society dictate that behaving in a racially biased manner is unacceptable and many individual Americans share that aspiration. Ironically, although contemporary cultural norms stress equality and fairness, the culture is also saturated with negative associations of black Americans. Thus, for many individuals, conflict persists between egalitarian goals and automatic negative attitudes and stereotype
Thus, the ACC is involved in performance monitoring, whereas the DLPFC is involved in implementing control. Dysregulation in either region can lead to reductions in self-control, either through a failure to note a potential error or a failure to implement task- or goal-appropriate responses. Studies of race processing posit that the DLPFC works in concert with the ACC, with the ACC detecting a conflict between conscious intentions and implicit attitudes and the DLPFC engaging a regulatory mechanism to control unwanted, implicit racial associations48.Evidence for the role of the DLPFC in the regulation of implicit attitudes comes from a series of studies in which the effect of interracial contact on cognitive control was measured11. White American participants with more negative implicit race attitudes performed worse on a Stroop test after interracial interactions than after same-race interactions49,50. Stroop impairment, the researchers argued, may have resulted from the depletion of cognitive resources with efforts to control negative racial attitudes in the interracial context. Notably, the magnitude of BOLD activity in the ACC and DLPFC when viewing black and white faces correlated with pro-white IAT scores, but only DLPFC activation mediated the relationship between implicit race preference and Stroop interference11. These findings suggest that a DLPFC regulatory mechanism may be engaged during interracial interactions to inhibit implicit race attitudes based on internal beliefs or awareness of societal attitudes
P. Molenberghs / Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 37 (2013)
Through evolution, the human brain has developed to adjust to complex social group living (Dunbar, 2011). Neuroimaging studies have shown that our neural correlates respond differently to in-group and out-group members (Eberhardt, 2005; Amodio, 2008; Ito and Bartholow, 2009; Chiao and Mathur, 2010; Kubota et al., 2012; Eres and Molenberghs, 2013). Understanding how these neural correlates are influenced by group membership is important for a better understanding of how complex social problems such as racism and in-group bias develop. Race is just one of many dimensions that people can use to categorize themselves
For example, Sherif et al. (1961) in their famous 1954 Robbers Cave experiment studied group conflict by inviting 22 fifth grader boys unbeknown to each other on a summer camp in Robber Cave State Park, Oklahoma. In the initial stage, they split the boys into two groups, without them knowing the existence of the other group, to establish solid in-group formation. Soon the two groups established themselves and they named themselves Rattlers and Eagles. It was found that only when both groups collaborated together on projects with a superordinate goal (e.g., both groups joined together to fix the water supply to the camp) did friction between the two groups diminish
The role of the medial prefrontal cortex in social categorization was also recently confirmed in two fMRI studies in which people had to categorize in-group versus out-group words (Molenberghs and Morrison, 2012; Morrisonet al., 2012).Viewing in-group versus out-group words that participants chose themselves and which they were familiar with led to increased activation in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex (Morrison et al., 2012). authors suggested that the difference in ventral and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex between the existing and newly-created groups was because the ventral part of the medial prefrontal cortex has been previously implicated in emotional social reasoning while the more dorsal part has been implicated in more abstract social reasoning (Saxe, 2006; Van Overwalle, 2009). This makes sense given the fact that we have a more emotional bond with the groups that we are familiar with (Molenberghs and Morrison, 2012). The ventral medial prefrontal cortex is also the region typically associated with self-referential processing (Northoff et al., 2006), which suggests that meaningful groups are closer related to our personal identity than arbitrary ones (Molenberghs and Morrison, 2012)
In a seminal study, Hastorf and Cantril (1954) asked Princeton and Dartmouth students to describe what happened during a controversial football game they saw between their two universities. The majority of Princeton students blamed Dartmouth players for the rough play whereas the majority of Dartmouth students claimed that both teams were to blame. Similarly, after watching a video about the game where students were asked to write down the number of infractions from each team, Princeton students claimed that other team made much more infractions. Dartmouth students, on the other hand, argued that the number of infractions was the same for both teams. Hastorf and Cantril (1954) concluded that both groups watched a totally different game or in their words: “The “same” sensory impingements emanating from the football field, transmitted through the visual mechanism to the brain, also obviously gave rise to different experiences in different people.”
This is exactly what Molenberghs et al. (2012b) set out to test. They randomly divided participants into red and blue team members and let them perform a team competition task to increase group identification. During this competition task, participants had to press a button faster than the opposing team member. In a subsequent experiment, participants were presented with video clips of in-group and out-group members pressing the button as quickly as possible. The task of the participants was to judge who pressed the button the fastest. Unbeknown to participants, the video clips were manipulated so that on average the in-group and out-group members pressed the button equally as fast. Yet participants on average judged the in-group member pressing the button faster (Molenberghs et al., 2012b). Two conclusions can be drawn from this study. Either participants “saw” the actions of both teams differently and judged accordingly as Hastorf and Cantril (1954) suggested participants perceived the actions the same but judged in favor of the in-group. To test this, Molenberghs et al. (2012b) performed a subsequent MRI experiment using a similar paradigm and measured participant’s brain responses at the time of watching the video clips and at the time of decision-making (when participants had to judge who was faster). Interestingly, they found that those participants that showed a behavioral in-group bias also showed an increase in inferior parietal lobule (an area crucial in perception–action coupling) activation when watching in-group members compared to out-group members performing the action but no difference in brain activation was found during the decision making process when participants had to judge who was fastest. This increase in inferior parietal lobule activation during action perception correlated positively with the amount of in-group bias people showed behaviorally. These results confirmed the suggestion by Hastorf and Cantril (1954), that people actually see the actions of in-group members differently than those of out-group members.
The neuroscience of empathy involves affective, cognitive and regulatory components (Decety, 2011). Affective empathy (i.e., the ability to resonate with what a person is feeling) relies partially on vicariously experiencing the emotions of others (Preston and De Waal, 2002; Keysers and Gazzola, 2009; Bernhardt and Singer, 2012) while cognitive empathy (i.e., the ability to take the perspective of someone else and understand what the person is thinking) relies partially on neural processes involved in Theory of Mind (Saxe, 2005; Amodio and Frith, 2006; Decety, 2011; Bernhardt and Singer, 2012). Not only do we want to understand what a person is feeling or thinking but we also want to respond in an appropriate way to other people’s emotions by regulating our own emotions and expressions. This regulation is especially important in situations that are socially unacceptable (e.g., showing explicit racism toward members of a minority out-group). Here the regulatory components of empathy come into play which rely on the neural processes involved in executive functioning such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Decety, 2011). The affective components of the “pain matrix” that are activated when receiving pain such as the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex are also activated when a person observes another in pain (Singer et al., 2004; Lamm et al., 2011). Xu et al. (2009) investigated whether these affective empathy pain regions would be more activated for in-group members compared to out-group members. To test this, they presented video clips to Caucasian and Chinese participants of in-group and out-group members receiving either physical pain (needle penetration) or non-painful(cotton swab touch) stimulation to the face. As expected, the fMRI results showed more activation in the anterior cingulate cortex when watching in-group members in pain compared to watching out-group members in pain. These findings suggest that participants resonated more with the pain of the in-group. Activation of the anterior insula in response to observing painful situations has also been shown to be influenced by group membership.
when an out-group member received pain they found more activation in the right ventral striatum (a brain region typically associated with pleasure and schadenfreude; Singer et al., 2006; Takahashi et al., 2009). This activation was negatively correlated with the desire to share the pain of the out-group member (Hein et al., 2010)
However, feelings of empathy toward an out-group member depend also on how much we like or dislike the out-group. For example, in an fMRI study Cikara and Fiske (2011) showed that when negative events happen to out-group members that participants disgust (e.g., drug addicts), they felt less empathy (less anterior insula activation) but when negative events happen to out-group members that participants felt pity for (e.g., older p
Like other psychological concepts, it seems that in-group bias is not a result of a single brain region. Rather, in-group bias develops as a result of a modulation of the neural correlates involved in a specific task. Large networks, such as those involved in Theory of Mind (Carrington and Bailey, 2008; Van Overwalle and Baetens, 2009; Bzdok et al., 2012), perception–action coupling (Molenberghs et al., 2009; Van Overwalle and Baetens, 2009; Molenberghs et al., 2012a), face perception (Fusar-Poli et al., 2009) and empathy (Fan et al., 2011; Bzdok et al., 2012) all seem to be modulated by group membership (Fig. 1). Sometimes these biases seem to happen implicitly (Cunningham et al., 2004; Xu et al., 2009; Molenberghs et al., 2012b), however biases in perceptions and emotions can also be modulated by exerting cognitive control (Richeson et al., 2003; Cunningham et al., 2004). The fact that expertise can even modulate basic emotions involved in affective empathy (Cheng et al., 2007; Decety et al., 2010) suggests that the more people become aware of their implicit racial biases, the more they will be able to regulate them. By becoming more aware that subtle modulations in social categorization (Volz et al., 2009; Molenberghs and Morrison, 2012; Morrison et al., 2012), action perception (Gutsell and Inzlicht, 2010; Molenberghs et al., 2012b), empathy (Harris and Fiske, 2006; Xu et al., 2009; Hein et al., 2010) and face perception (Cunningham et al., 2004; Van Bavel et al., 2008) can lead to in-group bias, we can in turn teach ourselves and others to recognize and control them through our executive functions so that we can create a more egalitarian society. These insights also have implications for cultural and developmental differences between individuals. For example, people in cultures that score high on vertical collectivism see themselves as part of the collective but accept inequalities within the group while people in cultures that score high on horizontal collectivism also see themselves as part of the collective but see all members of the collective the same (Singelis et al., 1995). Therefore it is likely that explicit and implicit neural correlates involved in perceiving others will be influenced by the cultural environment. In some cultures negative attitudes toward some individuals or out-groups might be more socially acceptable than in others, which would in turn modulate the individual’s executive control over his or hers in-group biases. Developmental differences can also influence the neural correlates involved in group membership perception. For example, when a child grows up in a family that has strong negative attitudes toward a certain group it will be difficult to inhibit these implicit negative attitudes in adulthood. In either case neuroplasticity, although less than in children, still exists to a large degree in adults so that cultural and developmental differences that our maladapted to the environment can still be modulated by new experiences and re-categorization (Cheng et al., 2007; Van Bavel et al., 2008; Decety et al., 2010
Why should we care?
Sapolsky
“If white person see a black face shown at subliminal speed the amygdala activates. - But if the face is shown long enough for conscious processing the anterior cingulate (just behind that forehead spot and before your corpus callosum -several complex cognitive functions, such as empathy, impulse control, emotion, and decision-making ) and the cognitive dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (a region of the frontal lobes that is most typically associated with executive functions including working memory and selective attention- very forehead part of your brain) then activate and inhibit the amygdala. It is the frontal cortex exerting executive control over the deeper darker amygdala response.
Perry: “Our first experiences create the filters through which all new experiences may pass. When the hardest thing to grasp without implicit bias and racism is that your beliefs and values do not always drive your behavior. These beliefs and values are stored in the highest most complex part of your brain the cortex. But other parts of your brain can make associations distorted inaccurate racist associations. The same person can have very sincere anti-racist beliefs but still have an implicit bias that results in racist comments or actions. Understanding sequential processing in the brain is essential to grasping this, as it is appreciating the power of developmental experiences to load the lower part of our brain with all kinds of associations that create a worldview. “
Profoundly influenced by the media period from infancy the media images we see shape our understanding of the world. Many white people there only experiences of perception of people of color through the media. When I was growing up the media was permitted with negative stereotypes about black people. When I was young black men and black youth in movies or on TV were more likely to be portrayed in negative ways as a criminal for example. They weren't the detective superheroes scientists. This distortion has an incredibly powerful impact on the way your brain organizes. It contributes to the negative association white people create about people of color, it's a big part of creating implicit bias. We all create our own version of the world that has distortions. As I said the brain shortcuts in processing information to make us vulnerable to bias. Everyone has some form of implicit bias some distortion of the world that's based on how and where they grew up. Imagine the odds of having every single culture and every single religion in every single ethnicity be a part of your safe and familiar catalog let alone being exposed all of that in the first part years of life. So we need to acknowledge that we carry some of these things around. Even news Isabella Wilkerson's book -criminal justice reform organization the sentencing project crimes involving black suspects and a white victim make up 10% of all crime but they account for 42% of what's on television. Let's take a moment to how the implicit bias plays a role in the interaction between an inexperienced white cop and a confrontation with a black teenager late at night. It's a matter of state dependent functioning. “Under threat the reasoning part of the brain starts to shut down and the more reactive emotional parts of the brain take over. Say you're the white cop and you feel threatened and you have a gun. If the lower more reactive parts of your brain start to dominate your cognitions and behaviors when you feel under threat and your brain is a whole catalog of black men is threatening criminals you are much more likely to engage in fear based behavior yelling escalating pulling a trigger with a black teen than with a white teen. Your brain isn't filled with a catalog of threatening white teens. Implicit bias suggests that bias is present but not plainly expressed sometimes even unintentionally expressed. Racism on the other hand is an actual overt set of beliefs about the superiority of one race over others. In the U S racism is the marginalized and oppression of people of color by a system created by white men to privileged white people. You could say that racism is embedded in the top rational part of your brain whereas implicit bias involves the distorted filters created in the lower part of the brain. When a child or youth is exposed to overt racist beliefs, perhaps Sibley in the home are peer groups, these beliefs become embedded in the filters. The result can be deeply ingrained set of feelings and beliefs that cut across multiple areas of the brain. Remember the cortex is the most malleable the most changeable part of our brain. Beliefs and values can change period implicit bias is much more difficult. You may truly believe that racism is bad that all people are equal. But those beliefs are in the intellectual part of your brain and your implicit bias which is in the lower parts of your brain will still play out every day and the way you interact with others the jokes you laugh at the things you say. It's interesting to watch how this relates to black lives matter movement. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd so many conversations have been sparked about structural racism implicit bias and right privilege. This is illuminated so much more misunderstanding and resulted in so much expressed pain. And of course so much defensiveness. I have never been a racist. I don't have a racist bone in my body. While the issue isn't in your bones. It's in your brain. All of us have deeply ingrained biases and lurking among those are racial associations. The challenge of addressing implicit biases first recognizing that you have it. Reflect on when your biases have been expressed. Anticipate when and where you are likely to express your bias. Be courageous enough to spend time with people who are different than you and may challenge your bias. It can be an uncomfortable period but remember moderate predictable and controlled stress can build resilience. Create new associations have no experiences. Ideally you go out into the community and spend time with people who are different than you are. You'll need to create real meaningful relationships so that you get to know individuals based on their unique qualities not based on categories.
Kuboto -
If good people who intend well act in a manner inconsistent with their own standards of egalitarianism because of the racial groups to which ‘the other’ belongs, then the question of change takes on new and urgent meaning. This urgency requires that we attend to the evidence about how our minds work when we confront racial and other group differences. Thus far, we have obtained modest evidence about these processes as they operate in our brains, unbeknownst to our conscious selves. The question of what we will do with these insights awaits an answer
What do we do about it?
Sapolsky
- stick your average person in a brain scanner and show him a picture of another race for only 1/10 of a second.
this is too fast for him to be aware of what he saw.
Brain loves shortcuts - amygdala activates - natural fear response.
However, if you show the picture for a longer time.
the amygdala activates
, but then the cognitive dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (a region of the frontal lobes that is most typically associated with executive functions including working memory and selective attention- very forehead part of your brain) does as well
This inhibits the amygdala
Our brains effort to control what is for most people an unpalatable initial response.
J Kahn -Pills for Prejudice
Study that argues the drug propranolol “abolishes” implicit bias, though not a proponent of a pill to cure racism - important it shows that racial biases are not immutable.
Sapolsky
“are we hardwired to fear the face of someone of another race, to process their face less as a face to feel less empathy? No. For starters, there's tremendous individual variation, not everyone's amygdala activates in response to other-race faces and those exceptions are informative. Moreover, subtle manipulations rapidly change the amygdaloid response to the face of the other.”
Boseman
Rewiring is Possible.
Neuroplaciticy - we once believed learning, growing/the brain changing only occurs up to a certain age, after which the human brain cannot change, totally false
Nueroplacity exists throughout our lives
This means neurons can and will continuously adapt and adjust to form new neural pathways as a result of
learning,
changes in behavior
changes in our environment.
Default brain might lead us to racist behavior - but nothing about our brain is set in stone
Reframing is Necessary.
Have research in changing our fear responses
Easier with neutral stimuli than things we perceive as dangerous
“If we rationally believe the object of our fear poses a real threat, it will be near impossible to undo the automated threat-response in our brain when facing this object. The implication is that if you are really serious about adjusting the conditioned racist response in your own brain, you need to change the way you think and talk about other races. Does someone pose a realistic threat just because they are different? If not, start to intentionally reframe the mental pictures you hold of them (including the terms you use to refer to them) to confirm that they are ‘neutral’ and not dangerous. As parents and leaders, we also have the responsibility to reframe racial images and perceptions for our children and those we lead.”
Exposure is Critical- close, positive interracial contact is what makes a difference
Anna Bradley -
“We can start with ourselves, becoming more aware of our explicit biases against certain people and reflecting upon where those biases come from. “
Must accept that we have implicit biases of which we are unaware. We must start to become aware of that and aware of how this impacts our individual choices, legal outcomes, human rights, human behavior, power, life.
