Friday, December 05, 2003
Covering up Racial Prejudice
The Economist was, a couple of issues back, carrying an excellent story on research that seems to indicate that covering up racial prejudice is tiring. The research question being addressed is one that I have wondered about in the past, especially in light of the extraordinary PC-ness I have witnessed since moving to the U.S.
In most places these days it is impossible to know what someone is actually thinking when he meets or works with someone of another race. Politeness makes it unacceptable to express prejudice, even if those attitudes are actually there. How hard do people work to overcome a prejudice that they feel but are not allowed to express?
The methodology?
The idea behind the theory of resource depletion is that the effort expended on suppressing prejudice depletes the ability to use cognitive control in subsequent tasks. The researchers recruited 30 white students as volunteers, and attempted to identify their racial attitudes using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). During an IAT, volunteers match positive and negative words such as “health”, “beauty”, and “ugly”, with names traditionally associated, at least in the United States, with black (such as Latisha and Tyrone) or white (Nancy and Greg) Americans. The IAT measures response times to these uncomfortable questions, and assigns higher levels of racial bias to white participants who are slower and less accurate in matching black names to positive attributes, and vice versa. The results of the IAT were used as a baseline from which to assess each volunteer's underlying prejudice.
Two weeks later, the same participants were recruited for a seemingly unrelated experiment, and were shown photographs of black and white faces while undergoing a brain scan. The scans revealed what Dr Richeson's team had suspected. Areas of the brain associated with cognitive control flared into activity proportionate to each volunteer's level of racial bias as measured by the IAT.
The bottom line, it seems, is that it is tiring to suppress racial prejudice. Furthermore, this has impact on a person's subsequent attention and performance. It is rather similar to the depletion of a muscle after intensive exercise.
Interesting indeed. You'd much rather have people be honest and so on, but what if the truth is rather unpalatable?
In most places these days it is impossible to know what someone is actually thinking when he meets or works with someone of another race. Politeness makes it unacceptable to express prejudice, even if those attitudes are actually there. How hard do people work to overcome a prejudice that they feel but are not allowed to express?
The methodology?
The idea behind the theory of resource depletion is that the effort expended on suppressing prejudice depletes the ability to use cognitive control in subsequent tasks. The researchers recruited 30 white students as volunteers, and attempted to identify their racial attitudes using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). During an IAT, volunteers match positive and negative words such as “health”, “beauty”, and “ugly”, with names traditionally associated, at least in the United States, with black (such as Latisha and Tyrone) or white (Nancy and Greg) Americans. The IAT measures response times to these uncomfortable questions, and assigns higher levels of racial bias to white participants who are slower and less accurate in matching black names to positive attributes, and vice versa. The results of the IAT were used as a baseline from which to assess each volunteer's underlying prejudice.
Two weeks later, the same participants were recruited for a seemingly unrelated experiment, and were shown photographs of black and white faces while undergoing a brain scan. The scans revealed what Dr Richeson's team had suspected. Areas of the brain associated with cognitive control flared into activity proportionate to each volunteer's level of racial bias as measured by the IAT.
The bottom line, it seems, is that it is tiring to suppress racial prejudice. Furthermore, this has impact on a person's subsequent attention and performance. It is rather similar to the depletion of a muscle after intensive exercise.
Interesting indeed. You'd much rather have people be honest and so on, but what if the truth is rather unpalatable?
