Unconscious racial bias goes deep — regardless of views on equality: study

PO1 William "Chip" Nagel
..."“Contemporary humans who belong to a socially dominant group are not freed from the belief that their group is more human than others,” the researchers wrote.

The research “demonstrates in a really stark way the continued dissociation between beliefs that people explicitly hold — and the sorts of mental associations that reside in our mind,” lead author Kirsten Morehouse, a psychology Ph.D candidate at Harvard University, told The Hill.

The researchers examined 61,000 people over a series of experiments determining how quickly participants could categorize an image as human or nonhuman.

This variant of a well-established psychological study called an implicit association test seeks to uncover the subconscious architecture of thought by assessing how quickly participants can separate categories.

“We can use [decision] time as a measurement of basic things that are inside people’s heads,” Morehouse said.

Past psychology experiments have shown that the length people take to perform a sorting task corresponds to how hard it is psychologically — creating an indirect means for uncovering bias and stereotypes.

In the first rounds of the Harvard study published Monday, participants were shown a series of images that included humans of varying races intermixed with images of animals.

On some of the tests, “White” and “Animal” were on one side of the screen, and “Black” and “Human” were on the other — and on others, the position of the races were reversed. (Click here to try the study.)"...

We are a tribal species and skin color is one way we have (at least recently) been defining tribe. We are not going to easily be able to undo millions of years of evolutionary advantage that resulted in a tribal mindset. All any of us can do is be aware of that fact and when you interact with someone from another "tribe", consciously think about if your peerceptions and reactions are coming from a place of reason or some sort of preconception.