Darren
Schreiber: Exactly. When I saw the Trayvon Martin story coming
out in the news, I thought "Wow, this is really powerful." Because we have this tendency to use that
context, whether it's a hoodie, whether it's the other types of clothing that people
are wearing, to change the stereotype we have for somebody.
There's a great quote from Jesse Jackson, where he was talking about
how he hates that he lives in a country where, if he is walking down the street
and hears footsteps behind him, he starts thinking about robbery, and if,
thinking about robbery, he turns around and sees that there is a White guy
behind him, he feels relieved. He said
he hated that. And he hates that because
he was recognizing an implicit association he made in his own mind between race
and threat, between African American and the threat of being robbed, and that
if he turns around and sees a white guy, that this makes him feel relieved, and
he said he hated that.
What's really telling, though, is to then think through the experiment:
if he had turned around and seen a White guy with a gun, would he have felt
relieved? Well, no! We don't expect he would have. If he had seen a White guy wearing the hood
of a KKK member, we don't think he would feel relieved; and if he had turned
around and had seen a Black man carrying his baby in his arms, again, we don't
think he'd feel threatened.
So, in our coalition membership we have implicit associations (all of
us, just like Jesse Jackson did) that connect people to different
stereotypes. But the good news of the
research I've been doing shows that we can override those stereotypes. And while we do have these stereotypes,
they're important, they change our behavior, they change, in particular, our
automatic reactions to situations, we can override that by making good
choices. I think that's great news.
Rob Kall: Isn't it true, though, that the amygdala can
actually kick in before a conscious response?
Before you even realize what you're seeing, the amygdala sees and responds. Doesn't that happen?
Darren
Schreiber: That is true. One way of thinking about it is that we have
two brain systems. Another one of my
colleagues, Matt Lieberman, that I've done research with when I was at UCLA,
talks about the brain as organized in the reflective and reflexive
systems. So in this model, the amygdala
is part of the reflexive system. It
automatically kicks in, as you said.
Maybe Jesse Jackson is walking down the street, he hears footsteps
behind him. He has this automatic, instantaneous
association of "Somebody is behind me; threat; and maybe it's a Black
person." This is a great Civil Rights
leader talking about his automatic association in these things.
And yet, we have also a reflective system. And so, while we do have these millisecond
fast reactions to phenomena and to stimuli, we can override that. And that's the great thing we have as humans,
a massive neocortex that allows us to reflect on a situation, and to hold down
our amygdala's automatic impulse. We
have tons of automatic impulses all the time, and yet, we as humans have the
ability to choose, to really think through things.
An example of this from my friend Matt Lieberman's work, is he did a
series of studies where he had people matching faces. So you see one face, and then you have to
match it with either a Black face or a White face. So they'd maybe show a Black face, and you're
supposed to match it with another Black face to show that, OK, you recognize
that's a Black face and match it with a Black face. Or he would show a Black Face or a White
face, and he'd ask you to match it with the words "African American" or
"Caucasian American."
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