How the Brain Views Race
Research on the link between implicit race preference
and brain activity could be used to prevent unintended
consequences of race bias
By Mo Costandi and Nature magazine
Scientific American
June 26, 2012
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-brain-views-race

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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