Research: Race Awareness Malleable

By JOAN MARGRUDER

A UC Santa Barbara study concludes that the degree to which individuals notice and remember each other's race is far more variable--and changeable--than previously thought.

According to the study, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, only a few minutes of exposure to a world in which race is irrelevant to intergroup competition is enough to strongly undermine people's awareness of each other's race.

The work was conducted by researchers with the Center for Evolutionary Psychology: John Tooby, professor of anthropology; Leda Cosmides, professor of psychology; and Robert Kurzban, a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA who received his Ph.D. in psychology at UCSB.

Decades of previous experiments at many universities had led many researchers to conclude that people had a strong, nonconscious tendency to note someone's race when forming an impression, and that this was difficult or perhaps impossible to change. If true, this would be discouraging, the authors wrote, "because categorizing others by their race is a precondition for treating them differently according to race"­that is, for racism.

This conclusion seemed implausible to the researchers because it was inconsistent with what was known about human evolution. "Human hunter-gatherers would rarely, if ever, have encountered a person of a different race," Cosmides said. "So natural selection would not have built mechanisms into the human brain for processing events that never happened."

"However, since people do readily note race in modern societies," Tooby said, "it had to be an expression of some other brain mechanism, one that race happens to trigger as a byproduct."

Because political conflict between alliances was a regular part of our ancestors' lives, the researchers theorized that humans had evolved brain mechanisms that note a person's membership in shifting coalitions. If this were true, then race was only noted by the brain because in current social contexts racial appearance often predicted patterns of cooperation and alliance­and coalitional alliances were something the mind was designed to remember.

This led them to suggest that race awareness would decrease when subjects are exposed to a social environment where race no longer predicted who was allied with whom. The experiments they conducted strongly supported these predictions.

"We were startled by just how easy it was to diminish the tendency to note and remember another person's race," the researchers say. Despite the fact that people tested had years of prior experience in social environments where race carried some social significance, "less than four minutes of exposure to an alternative social world in which race was irrelevant to the prevailing system of alliance caused a dramatic decrease in the extent to which they categorized others by race."

For more information go to the center's Web site <www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep>.