Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
I like to think that my decades practicing medicine have trained me to not be biased towards people of other races. But I have often wondered why some obviously biased thoughts are automatically generated when I am observing other people, even now. Some recent articles suggest that I shouldn’t be concerned. Rapid automatic generation of bias has a neural basis; it is how we respond that is important.
I had read Philip Ball’s article in the Guardian over Christmas. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/26/biology-race-angela-saini-misconceptions-science
In it he linked to Angela Saini’s article in the Guardian that she wrote when her book Superior: The Return of Race Science, was published. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/18/race-science-on-the-rise-angela-saini
These are both thoughtful essays on race and our perception of it in others, and are important if we want to stand up to the racial bullies so prevalent today. As Philip writes: ‘…genomics has identified no clusters of gene variants specific to conventional racial groupings: there is more genetic variation within such groups than between them…Isn’t it better to say that yes, race has a biological basis – but the relevant bodily features are a trivial part of what makes us us?’ Our definition of race, is a social construct, not a genetic one.
Now Yuqing Zhou and others from the School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University in Beijing, China have published an article in Nature about the neuroscience involved. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0743-y
In it they write: ‘Despite the dominant cultural norms that oppose racial discrimination, persistent and pervasive biases against individuals due to their perceived race exist in employment and housing markets, clinical treatment, and jury judgments, among other situations. There is even an increasing trend in racial resentment in the twenty-first century. To understand the psychological drive and the neural basis of racial discrimination shown in social behaviour, researchers have discovered racial biases in cognition and brain activity, such as poor recognition of other-race (OR) compared with same-race (SR) faces, implicit negative attitudes towards OR individuals and decreased empathic brain responses to the suffering of OR individuals compared with SR individuals. These racial biases are ubiquitous, as the racial in-group favouritism in face recognition and empathic brain activity has been reported in different ethnic groups and in numerous societies.’
‘To classify individuals into different racial groups, that is, racial categorization, at the cost of ignoring the identity of each individual, might have helped track alliances during evolution. However, racial categorization provides a precondition for racial biases in behaviour, cognition and brain activity’.
‘Recent psychological models have assumed an increased motivation to view OR people categorically but to perceive SR people individually. The processes of racial categorization are further proposed to be associated with racial biases in memory, emotion and social decision-making. However, to date, how the human brain enables spontaneous categorization of some individuals to one racial group but others to a different racial group is not fully understood.’
‘In experiments 1–4, we recorded EEG images with millisecond time resolution to examine the time courses of the neural processes involved in the racial categorization of faces. The results unravelled distinct time courses of categorization of OR and SR faces and identified the key role of perceived racial relationships and facial configuration information in determining the neural processes underlying racial categorization. In experiment 5, we employed fMRI to record BOLD signals with millimetre spatial resolution to examine the neural networks underlying racial categorization. The results revealed distinct neural networks involved in the categorization of OR and SR faces and of different subgroup of OR faces. In experiment 6, we recorded MEG images to further analyse the spatiotemporal dynamics of the neural networks involved in the categorization of faces from each racial group and examined possible associations between the neural underpinnings of racial categorization and racial biases in cognition and emotion. The results suggested that there are distinct dynamic neural models of categorization of faces from different racial groups, which further predict racial biases in face recognition, empathy and altruistic intentions.’
Brilliant stuff that indicate the innate responses shared by all of us. I think the last words should to to Philip Ball:
‘We’re not cognitively well equipped to develop the right intuitions here.’
‘It is probably showing white supremacists (from whom I heard a little after my review) more charity than they deserve to say that they’re caught up in the same confusion. There’s more to their delusions than that, however. Their brains are exercising another of its perilous adaptations: the tendency to find ways of rationalising what it suits us to believe.’
‘This confusion persists, however, even among geneticists, biologists and doctors who we might expect to be better informed on such matters, for whom the use of “race” as a crude predictive tool can distort expectations and reinforce false assumptions about what it really means. We all have those corner-cutting brains.’
‘I always knew at some level that race is an inference about traits based on appearance. But finding the right way to articulate it has made me appreciate that it is much harder to “see beyond” at the subconscious level. Rationalising and good intentions aren’t enough; this is about undoing a habit of mind.’
‘It also suggests that there is no tidy, comfortable story we can tell ourselves that dismisses the complexities and even the contradictions of race.’
‘My own task is to recognise how it manifests in myself and in a culture that confers privilege on me as a result. I’ll ignore sneers of “white guilt”; I see instead a duty to listen and learn, and a readiness to accept that I might still get it wrong.’
So look listen and learn, and don’t react without thinking first. Unfortunately we’ll still get it wrong sometimes. I know I do.
