Racial fears

Nature of racial fears probed
Researchers also study how people unlearn their biases

By Dennis O'Brien
Sun Staff
Originally published August 12, 2005

Shedding the fears that we acquire about people of other races
is as difficult as shaking our fear of spiders and snakes,
researchers say. But personal contact with someone of another
race helps ease those fears.

Psychologists at Harvard and New York University conditioned
more than 70 NYU students to associate images of black and white
men with a mildly uncomfortable electric shock.

When the students were repeatedly shown the same images without
the shocks, their fears of the other racial group remained as
deep-seated as those of a group conditioned to fear spiders and
snakes.

The fear of the other race registered whether the test subjects
were white or black. But the fears disappeared more quickly
among participants who had dated across racial lines, the
researchers say.

"What it says is, there's no question that there's a benefit to
having positive contact with people of different races," said
Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard psychology professor and co-author of
the study, published in the journal Science.

Studies as far back as the 1970s show that people have an easier
time recognizing faces from their own racial groups. Known as
the same-race advantage, it occurs more consistently among
whites than blacks, particularly among whites who have little
contact with blacks.

"It could be that in this country at least, black people have
more contact with whites than whites have with blacks," said
Laura Thomas, a researcher at the Center for Cognitive
Neuroscience at Duke University.

The authors of the Science study say their work shows that we're
reluctant to change what we've learned about people who look
different. "It's not about race, so much as about social groups
that you tend to label as yours and not yours. We're less
willing to incorporate new information about people from a
different social group," said Elizabeth Phelps, a cognitive
neuroscientist at NYU.

Phelps said the study goes a step further than previous work by
documenting for the first time whether we can "unlearn" fear.

She said that by recognizing such fears, people may be more
willing to address them and become more sensitive to the
hostilities faced by various groups, such as Arab Muslims here
after the Sept. 11 attacks.

She finds it encouraging that the fear disappeared more quickly
among students who had dated across racial lines. Some 50
percent of the black NYU students had dated someone of the other
race and about 25 percent of the white students had cross-dated,
Phelps said.

"It's naive to say that we don't have these biases," she said.
"But it's nice to know they can be changed by social contact."

The study consisted of two experiments. In the first, 17 NYU
students were shown images of two creatures that traditionally
inspire fear (spiders and snakes), along with images of two
creatures usually thought of as harmless (birds and
butterflies). Electrodes attached to the fingertips measured
participants' emotional states by detecting changes in their
sweat glands.

The 13 females and four males each saw the four images six
times. Each was given an electrical shock when viewing one of
the creatures in each of the two sets . The participants then
repeatedly viewed the same images without shocks to see how
quickly the fear response disappeared.

In the second experiment, 73 students were hooked up to the
electrodes and repeatedly viewed images of two black and two
white males, all wearing neutral expressions. Each of the 37
black and 36 white participants was shocked while viewing one
white face and one black face. The participants then viewed the
same images repeatedly without shocks.

The fear responses persisted, despite the absence of shocks,
when participants viewed images of opposite racial groups - just
as they persisted when participants viewed snakes and spiders in
the first experiment.

But the fear responses quickly disappeared when participants
viewed images of their own racial groups or of butterflies and
birds.

Participants also completed surveys probing their racial
attitudes to detect bias.

Some experts said the Science study goes beyond our fear of
other races. They said the findings are the result of our
evolutionary development as creatures who have learned to fear
outsiders as a survival mechanism.

"It's in our nature to be more skeptical, more wary of a member
of an outside group," said Arne Ohman, a researcher at the
Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

In a perspective article accompanying the report in Science,
Ohman argues that what we call race is a relatively recent
notion in human society. But fear of outside groups has been
common for thousands of years among tribes of hunter-gatherers.

But not everyone sees the results as evidence of our
evolutionary past. "I don't know if you can draw that
conclusion," said William Cunningham, a psychologist at the
University of Toronto.

Cunningham recently recorded brain scans of 13 white
participants as they viewed photos of white and black faces for
two types of intervals: moments that were so brief the images
barely registered or for a half second so they were clearly
visible.

He found that when black faces were presented very quickly, the
brain region associated with emotion - the amygdala - was more
activated. But when the black faces were shown for a
half-second, there was greater activation in the frontal cortex
areas associated with control and regulation. He published his
findings last year in Psychological Science.

"People have a response that is negative initially, but then
that's tempered by reflection and the initial response is
modified," he said.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/health/bal-hs.race12aug12,1,1175062.story?coll=bal-health-headlines
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