Brain scans reveal racial biases

Anna Gosline:

Negative feelings about black people may be subconsciously learned by both white and black Americans, suggests a brain imaging study. The research is among the first to test the brain physiology of racial biases in both black and white subjects.

The new study showed that both white and black people had increased activity in an area of the brain called the amygdala - which responds to fearful or threatening situations - when completing a matching task with images of black faces.

“I think the results are very specific to being raised in this society where the portrayal of African Americans is not very positive, on average,” says Matthew Lieberman at the University of California, Los Angeles, US, who led the study. “It suggests that those cultural messages are not harmless.”

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