Liz Phelps was one of the first researchers to tackle how the brain responds to people of different racial groups.
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From Nature magazine
How the brain responds to and processes images of people from different racial groups is an emerging field of investigation that could have major implications for society. Psychologist Elizabeth Phelps of New York University, in New York, who in 2000 led one of the first studies in this area, tells Nature what her latest review of the field reveals about the neuroscience of race.
What does psychology tell us about race?
Social psychologists differentiate between the attitudes that people express and their implicit preferences. This can be studied using the implicit association task, which measures initial, evaluative responses. It involves asking people to pair concepts such as black and white with concepts like good and bad. What you find is that most white Americans take longer to make a response that pairs black with good and white with bad than vice versa. This reveals their implicit preferences.
What did your review of the neuroscience literature show?
My colleagues and I found that there’s a network of brain regions that is consistently activated in neuroimaging studies of race processing. This network overlaps with the circuits involved in decision-making and emotion regulation, and includes the amygdala, fusiform face area (FFA), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC).
What did your previous work show?
Our 2000 study was the first to link race preference to brain activity. We measured the eye-blink startle, a reflex response that people display when they hear a loud noise, for example. A lot of studies have shown that this reflex is potentiated [enhanced] when people are anxious or in the presence of something they think is negative. We found that implicit preferences were correlated with potentiated startle, and that both were correlated with the amount of amygdala activation.
How does the neuroscience fit with the psychological model?
Activity in the FFA isn’t surprising, because all of these studies use photos of faces. The amygdala is involved in emotions, and might be linked to the automatic evaluations we make when we see people from other racial groups. We think that the ACC and DLPFC are involved in more complex functions. People tend to show unintentional indications of race bias, even when they are motivated to be non-prejudiced, so the ACC may be involved in detecting these conflicts. You can have an implicit bias and choose not to act on it, and the DLPFC may be trying to regulate the emotional responses that conflict with our egalitarian goals and beliefs.
What about people who are overtly prejudiced?
Finding differences in people with extreme views wouldn’t be too surprising, but I’m not sure we’d see anything more than an exaggerated [emotional] response. We’re more interested in ‘normal’ people. Those who are more internally motivated to be non-prejudiced show greater ACC activity, whereas those who hold extreme views obviously have explicit, intentional race bias and don’t care about controlling their emotional responses.
What are the societal implications of this research?
Most white Americans we studied show an implicit preference for their own group. They don’t have bad intentions, but because they’ve associated black people with, say, criminality so many times, their decisions are infused with that association, whether or not they believe it’s accurate. There’s evidence of unintentional race bias at every stage of the legal process. Despite the fact that it aims to be egalitarian, sentencing is vastly different for African Americans. The bias is also there in employment.
How should this research progress?
We need to investigate how our implicit preferences are linked to the choices and decisions we make. We want to use this knowledge to reduce the unintended consequences of race bias — the things we do that aren’t consistent with our beliefs. One problem is the lack of funding for this type of work. It’s very hard to fund this kind of research because it’s not really relevant to health. One way to go would be to apply the sophisticated tools of neuroeconomics to investigate how unintentional bias affects our decision making. The research could also be linked to emerging work on controlling emotions.
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on June 26, 2012.
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15 Comments
Add CommentInteresting research. It would also be interesting
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisto look into connections between the dichotomies
involved in implicit level and choice level neural
processes on the one hand and recent studies showing
measurable anatomical brain differences between self-
described conservatives and liberals (apparently
among university level students?) The latter also
involved the amygdala and the ACC. See wikipedia
articles on these studies. It shouldn't really
surprise us that there would be a material neuro-
basis for our various mixes of prejudices and the
manner in which we do or do not act them out.
However, I must point out to Prof. Phelps that
there is indeed a powerful relevance to health
in these studies. Prejudices, racial and other,
are daily impacting the mental and physical well
being and health of untold millions of people.
The health costs, not to mention the social and
economic costs, of still powerful racist assumptions
from the 19th century propelled through the 20th
and on into the 21st century are sadly eroding
and draining the few gains we've made in civil
rights and liberties.
The more we do know what is really going on in
our heads and hearts, the better off we'll all
be in the long run. And the less likely that
we'll be the easy targets of unscrupulous snake-
oil salesmen eager to divide us from one another
and our money and from our power of collective
action. Knowledge truly is power.
Thanks.
Sam Harris also quotes brain MRI imaging studies to show that we are implicitly racists no matter what we might claim about 'not having a racist bone in our body.'
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's of course always vital to be acquainted with the truth as revealed by the subconscious responses of our brain.
Our racist attitudes might have evolved over tens of thousands of years at the very least.
It'd be naive to expect that humans would suddenly become enlightened and completed racially unprejudiced because some law was enacted or something.
The best we can hope for is that we will learn to overcome our in-built biases in a few generations.
Except that we are not inherently racially prejudice because of some genetic trait. These are things that are built up over time through exposure to racism in society (and maybe at home). Racism is a social construct because race is a social construct. Sociology has done a good job of proving that. Racism did not evolve. There is no such thing as race. This research is fine in that it measures people's response to something they have learned, but we should be very careful not to legitimate bias as a natural and innate act of humanity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo if I have two groups of m&ms, both groups have 100 red m&ms, group A has 10 green m&ms while group B has 7 green m&ms it is perfectly reasonable for me to assume all m&ms from group A are potentially green?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are differences in expressions of phenotypes, but the idea that these in any way cause a real change in behavior or have a bearing on other characteristics is false and absurd. There are real things such as blondes, but you don't make other assumptions about blondes. We don't categorize people as blonde and non-blonde and discriminate in a systemic way against them. (Blonde jokes aside.) The racial lines we've drawn in America is not some natural division of race that is recognized the world over. My boyfriend is of Taino Indian, Spanish, and African descent. He racially identifies as Puerto Rican, something that most Americans would say is a nationality or at best ethnicity. He is darker than me (a societally defined white person, though that itself would have been looked upon differently in other time periods), but he is certainly not very dark. Many people define him as black. He does not view himself as black, and certainly would never call himself African-American. His brother, too, would identify as Puerto Rican, with the same mix of ancestry, etc. However my boyfriend's brother appears white to most people. He does not identify as white, and his genetic structure is very similar to his brother's, so why should they fall into separate racial categories? And why should those categories matter? Race is a different issue from phenotype.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDogs are an example of something that has had its breeding patterns specifically manipulated by humans to achieve specific results. You may not be able to use Jack Russels to pull your sled, but you can breed them with the Huskys to try for some hybrid ideal in a few generations because THEY ARE ALL DOGS! They remain the same species!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCertainly taller people would require more food to sustain them than shorter people would, I'm sure my 6' tall father eats more than my 5'1" mother. There are differences related to phenotype. But I wouldn't suggest that someone with darker skin eats more than someone with lighter skin, and I certainly wouldn't go so far as to say that they do so because of some in-born desire to waste resources. This is the difference between phenotype and race.
Race is a social construct but as such is also a societal reality. But at this point it's obvious that you're just trying to be a dick, so I will go on with my day.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would be interested to see this study replicated in a highly multiracial location such as Toronto, using younger people who have grown up immersed in a multiplicity of groups.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat is not clear in the study as described is what the brain response is directed at: is the brain reacting automatically to different genetics, or is it reacting to learned conditioning?
The implications are vastly different. A reaction that is based on perhaps an automatic "search for self" is much more innocent and blameless, and perhaps more hopeless to correct, than a reaction based on conditioning.
Very good article and discussion. By the time I read this the post by Nagnostic was removed so I have no idea what offensive tripe he was spewing but based on previous posts it was probably stupid.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have always known that I am an innate bigot but as a child the vast majority of my friends were minorities so I tend to suppress my inner jackwagon and actually try to act civilized. The act seems to have been partially successful because both of my sons have plenty of minority friends.
The brain is wired to use ingroup/outgroup information in choices. The issue is who gets to be ingroup and who is outgroup. If you spend your life around african americans - eg, because they are your family - they become ingroup. In addition to exposure, the usually suspects education, history and stress impact on the intensity of these reactions, and it appears likely that there is a genetic component to the intensity of these reactions. These may be related, eg, a gene that makes you more sensitive to stress, will intensify your fear of outgroupers if you're stressed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a subjective experience, the outgroup "stranger danger" reaction will be felt as stress or unease. The normal human reaction is to invent a narrative to explain the feeling, eg, "He looks like a criminal" etc.
If the aim is to reduce racial discrimination the best strategies would aim break down the internal ingroup/outgroup detection system, or, shift as many people as possible out of the outgroup categories.
I agree jimb2. I'd like to add that racism cannot be defined by an early response towards an individual of different race. I'm Puerto Rican, we are not even a race but it takes me a while to stop experiencing some anxiety/discomfort when interacting with white people. Am I a racist? absolutely not, I cannot be. But, I did not grow up around white people so they are like a new thing. You have a rat, you add something new to the environment (i.e. new toy), the animal is going to experience some anxiety and then is going to calm down and get used to the "novelty".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll in all, I do not think this article is saying anything informative about racism. Do the novelty-induced response to racially different subjects deeply affects society? Sure thing.
As always, the interpretations of imaging studies are pretty limited in terms of understanding complex concepts like "race". So while outsized interpretations might sell articles, I'm not really sure we can infer all that much from neuroimaging studies which we didn't already know.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor a good knock down of this review, see: http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.ca/2012/07/racist-brain.html
Most, maybe all animals that tend to live in social groups seem to exclude "outsiders" or others". Ants will kill other ants not belonging to their nest, sometimes even if they are of the same species. Chimps will kill chimps that belong to a different group. Wolves, lions, all the same. There is an evolutionary advantage to this behavior.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs that which we call "racism" driven by our own biological drive to "exclude" the "other"?
Excellent study and good to know. We often snap into a certain kind of bias or racist mentality without our own conscious knowledge, then we remember that it is not right to judge character by skin color. Nevertheless, racism runs deep and wise in the Amerikan psyche. Namaste! Peter S. Lopez AKA @Peta_de_Aztlan on Twitter ~Sacramento, California
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAgree. There is the human race, racism is a social construction but it exists in the psyche nonetheless. We cannot fool ourselves and be race-blind or color-blind. Thank you. Namaste! Peter S. Lopez AKA @Peta_de_Aztlan on Twitter ~Sacramento, California
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