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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