White guys do not look all alike…
Catching up child development and behaviour related articles that I’ve seen and read over the past few weeks.
A study was recently published by Sophie Labrecht, Lara J. Pierce, Michael J. Tarr and, James W. Tanaka, from Brown University and the University entitled “Perceptual Other-Race Training Reduces Implicit Racial Bias“. The team attempted to:
…examine the relationship between these two biases, we trained Caucasian subjects to better individuate other-race faces and measured implicit racial bias for those faces both before and after training.
They did this by showing a series of images showing the faces of a variety of people of African ancestry to two groups - one that merely had to identify race and the other instead were prompted to differentiate between specific facial characteristics across all photos. What they found was people who were trained to discriminate amongst features within a group exhibited less racial bias than the control group that did not receive any detailed training.
Taking this into the economic behaviour realm, this implies that without explicit and deliberate exposure to people of other races (read: skin colours, facial features etc.) individuals and those organizations they work for are likely to have reduced effectiveness in economic dealings. If you’re unable to see people of a particular racial group as individuals you’ll be unable to deal with them effectively, reducing the shared utility of any interaction and making it less likely that such transactions will be repeated. So there are a couple of things to take away here. If you run a business or do trade in a non-homogenous community, it is well worth your organization’s while to learn to differentiate between customers of other races, as it will reduce bias and very likely improve your customer relationships. For those of you with children it suggests that regular exposure to people of differring races will help them function better in a heavily globalized world, where cross-cultural connections are moving in new directions all the time. The better they can differentiate faces, the more empathy they’re likely to have and the more easily they will adapt.
Now if this finding is to be quite effective, then it’s important that someone develop related training or educational materials that can be used widely. Of course, whoever does will step in a racial debate minefield that would likely be discouraging.
This is also presents a strong case against ghettoization and segregation. If people in a multi-cultural country like Canada or the US tend to group together racially and culturally they will continue to have functional biases against those that look different than them reducing their economic prospects and those of their children. It’s also become much easier since internal support segregation can be enhanced by satiating on culturally biased media - easily available via the internet and 500 cable channel feeds.
Of course if you’re strident you’ll miss the cool point of the whole paper - the potential for simple and effective cultural development - and instead focus on the ugly use of the word and idea of races.
Thanks to the BPS Research Digest Blog for the link.
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