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General News    H2'ed 3/29/13

Transcript: Neuropolitics-- Brain Studies That Differentiate Political Party Preference

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Rob Kall
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Rob Kall:   Now, looking over some of your research, or maybe it's the preview you gave me of the first chapter of the book you're working on, you talk about the idea that racism is more involved in stereotypes than the actual race?  Could you - this sounds like the kind of thing you're talking about.

 

 

Darren Schreiber:   Yes.  So, Rob Cursans, who is a researcher at University of Pennsylvania and a good friend of mine, did some fantastic work a number of years ago.  People had thought for many many years that racism was just hardwired, that we were somehow fundamentally built to be racist and to discriminate against others.  And what Rob did is, in this one very clever experiment, he had people pay attention to two scenarios, one in which there was a conflict among two basketball teams. 

 

And in the first instance of it, the basketball teams were divided between Whites and Blacks, and in the second, the basketball teams were intermixed,  the Jets and the Sharks.  The first experiment there, the Jets are all Black and the sharks are all White, and in the second experiment they're mixed by racial grouping, and so there's Black and White on both teams.  And what Rob showed in his very clever experiment in a paper called Can Race Be Erased? was that when race was no longer tied to team membership, people paid attention to team membership rather than to race, and that, essentially, in a very quick experiment, in a few minutes, you could erase the cognitive effects of race in this narrow type of context.  And people paid attention to "Are you a member of my team or not?  Are you a member of the Jets or the Sharks?" rather than "Are you White or Black?" 

 

As I've gone through that step in the fifth chapter of my book, talking about this idea of race and how it interplays, the way that I see it is as a modern manifestation of this coalitional cognition.  Me trying to figure out "Are you an us or are you a them?"  And from that perspective, racism, the idea of racism as being hardwired just doesn't make sense, because we change coalitions really frequently.  I've got some brain imaging studies that show that when people are looking at faces of Whites or of Blacks, there is a tendency to have a stronger activation in the part of the brain called the amygdala. 

 

The amygdala is the part of the brain that is involved in fear and threats and all kinds of other social types of cognition, so I don't want to oversimplify the issue, but one way people who have looked at this have done studies of looking at the amygdala when they've showed faces to both whites and blacks, and there is a tendency I think because of pervasive racial stereotypes in our culture, to have this threat-related reaction to African American faces.  And that's true, again, for whether the subjects are White or Black.  When they seeing Black faces, there is this internal offensive threat in varying levels. 

 

When you change the experiment a little bit, and you don't just put faces, but you put people in real context (which is what I did), what we find is that, all of a sudden, well, in the first instance, where I showed that, again, people have these amygdala reactions to Black faces; when you shift, and you show faces of Black police officers, or Black politicians, or Black businessmen, or Black families, Black students, what you show is that, that membership of those people who are consistent with mainstream social norms, they don't activate the amygdala.  So in a very quick context, just in context, when we see a person in a context, that context can give us more information that can trump out initial racial prejudices.

 

Rob Kall:   Kind of the "Hoodie Response."

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Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness (more...)
 

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