44 | New Scientist | 29 August 2020
you got home. Or you might feel worried
about them and guilty that you didn’t help.
That’s a feeling you want to avoid having
every time you leave your house.
We have demonstrated that the brain
regions that are always engaged when
you think about other people aren’t
engaged when you think about different
types of people – in this case, what we call
“extreme out-groups” like drug addicts
and homeless people.Where does unconscious bias, and
particularly racism, fit in to all this?
Is it also a form of dehumanisation?
When we did the first dehumanisation
studies, a lot of people said it represented
the worst kind of prejudice. But it turns out
that when you look at the brain, prejudice is
a slightly different function. They are both
the result of a learning process, but whereas
dehumanisation is linked to disgust,
prejudice is linked to fear.
The reason why we are prejudiced – and
I like to say that we are all prejudiced – is
because we live in cultures where certain
things get associated. For instance, if you
constantly see African Americans committing
violent criminal acts in the media, your brain
associates violent criminal behaviour with
African Americans.
Bias against LGBTQ+ people is often rooted
in disgust and fear, with the perception being
that they threaten traditional values around
marriage and male-female gender roles. Not
that every form of social bias is threat-based;
elderly people, for example, are passively
harmed by being ignored.
When you see an out-group member who
you have tagged as threatening, regardless of
whether they really are, a region of the brain
called the amygdala is activated. This is what
processes fear. So prejudice is essentially a
threat response. This is part of the reason
I have always had an issue which the term
implicit bias, because you are always awareawareness we just mentioned. It’s like if you
know you are afraid of spiders but you also
know that fear is silly because, in the UK at
least, they aren’t going to hurt you. So if
you are cleaning the bath and a spider
pops up, you move it. Your ability to do that,
even though you are terrified, is the same
ability that lets you override bias, racial
or otherwise. Your awareness of the threat
response that you have to an out-group
can allow you to regulate it.
Another way is to undo the learning. Even
though the associations we learn can be hard
to shake, you can do it if you have enough
experiences with members of an out-group
to realise they are actually not threatening.
This is known to psychologists as the contact
hypothesis – the idea that if different groups
interact, you can reduce bias.
The third way, and the one that is least
tried, is to get rid of the categories in which
we put people. Prejudice begins because
you have made that person a member of
a category that is threatening. If you had
put that person in a different category
from the beginning, you wouldn’t have
the threat response.
The problem is that by default we
categorise people by demographic
characteristics like age, gender and race.
That is how we like to see the world. But
you can see the world in many different
ways: you can see a person as a member of a
particular occupational group, for instance,
or any number of categories that aren’t
necessarily tied to this threat response that
has been instilled over centuries and is now
fundamental in our cultures.Lots of companies are now offering implicit
bias training. Does it work?
No. There has been a lot of research looking at
implicit bias training, and it doesn’t work for
a variety of reasons. One is that it is usually
mandatory, which means that people aren’t
motivated. The second reason is that it
usually serves a legal checkbox function,
which I think then spills over to the people
who do it. So they think “I’ve done
unconscious bias training, so I’m not biased”.of your threat response. It’s not really about
being aware and unaware; it is a basic survival
response. It is going to shape how you
behave, and you are going to at least be
aware of your behaviour.What is a more accurate way to describe
our feelings of prejudice towards others?
I think a better term is just bias. Saying
that you are biased doesn’t mean you are a
morally bad person. It’s not like you decided
to have these thoughts. You just happen to
live in a society where that is the way things
are structured. But you can still be held
accountable for your bias, because you have
the ability to regulate and override it.How can people override their biases?
There are a few ways. The first and perhaps
most prevalent is to encourage that“ Saying that you
are biased doesn’t
mean you are
morally bad, but
you can still be
held accountable”
Our fear response, governed
by the amygdala (in red),
seems to underpin prejudice SC
IENCE
PHOTO^ LIBRARY/ALAMY