Bias in the blink of an eye

Apr 29

“Depressing.” “Hopeless.” “A disaster.”

This is how Prof. Robert Sapolsky describes research showing we’re hardwired to identify someone as Us or Them based on race. It all happens in the blink of an eye, around 100 milliseconds, well before conscious thought.

So what can we do?

Three examples

Sapolsky picks out three examples from the sea of research on Us and Them.

Show a white person a black face at subliminal speed and their amygdala, a brain region concerned with fear and stress responses, activates. No such activation occurs when they see someone of the same race.
Show a person a face of someone from a different race, again at subliminal speed, and the region of the brain region responsible for recognizing faces shows less activation than for someone of the same race. In general, the faces of other races are less likely to be identified or remembered as human faces.
Show a video of someone’s hand being poked with a needle and your own hand will tense in empathy. Less so, on average, if the hand has a different skin color.

Sapolsky asks: “Are we hardwired to fear the face of someone of another race, to process their face less as a face, to feel less empathy?”

“No.”

Some Good News

For starters, Sapolsky notes that race is a new kind of Us and Them from an evolutionary perspective.

“For the hunter-gatherers of our hominin history, the most different person you’d ever encounter in your life came from perhaps a couple of dozen miles away, while the nearest person of a different race lived thousands of miles away—there is no evolutionary legacy of humans encountering people of markedly different skin color.”

And so, as ingrained as the bias may seem, we can readily change the boundaries of who’s Us and who’s Them using other characteristics besides race. These characteristics can be as trivial as wearing the same shirt color or a baseball cap from the same team.

Prof. Susan Fiske at Princeton, before showing images of faces, prompted participants to think of whether the person they’re about to see might like a certain vegetable. After that simple prompt, the amygdala didn’t activate for other-race faces.

“[Thinking] about somebody’s food preferences brings back the medial prefrontal cortex, it brings back the concept that this is a human being who might like carrots or might not like carrots. It does not have to be a deep analysis but it makes the person a person again. So this viewing of some out-groups as basically vermin is a sort of default response but it can be undone, depending on the way that you relate to them.”

While asking about food preferences or wearing the same baseball cap won’t eradicate bias, it does point to a way forward.

Change that lasts

Sapolsky asserts that individuation, seeing one of Them as an individual human being, is one of the best ways to override our hardwired tendencies, to change the boundaries of who’s in our in-group. People who grew up in racially and ethnically diverse environments, for example, don’t have their amygdala activate when shown faces from other races. They have a broader definition of Us.

This is an example of Contact Theory in action. However, other implementations have varied results because just bringing people together tends to have short-term benefits or even make things worse. You’re more likely to make a lasting difference in how people relate when “everyone’s treated equally and unambiguously; contact is lengthy and on neutral, benevolent territory; there are ‘superordinate’ goals where everyone works together on a task they care about.”

Connecting Us and Them in the Workplace

One of our aspirations for Working Out Loud is that we can improve human relations through our social learning methods. Our programs are designed for individuation (e.g., the “50 Facts About You” exercise in Week 5 of the original method). And they meet the criteria for successful implementations of Contact Theory: purposeful exchanges related to shared goals; occurring in a psychologically safe space; extending for eight to twelve weeks. That’s enough interaction to build deep trust and a sense of relatedness. “We started as strangers and became friends” is a common feedback we receive.

Companies that use WOL may describe their corporate goals in different terms (“Crossing silos”, “Increasing collaboration across divisions and functions”). But in the end we aim for participants go beyond that, to experience a meaningful shift in how they relate to others and to themselves.

Changing how we instinctively divide the world and the workplace into Us and Them may seem naive or quixotic, but as Susan Fiske writes:

“It is human nature to be more comfortable with people who are like you or who you think are like you. It is not surprising. But that does not mean we cannot try to do something about it.”

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