People with implicit racial prejudices are left mentally exhausted after interacting with someone from a different race, perhaps because they are trying to quell their feelings.
The new study, the first of its kind, shows that areas in the brain associated with self-control light up in white people with implicit racial biases when they are shown images of black people.
Furthermore, the study showed that the level of this brain activity correlated very closely with poor performance in a test of thinking ability given right after a face-to-face interview with a black person. The researchers believe this indicates that the subject's mental resources have been temporarily drained by their efforts to suppress their prejudices.
Jennifer Richeson, who led the study, was surprised by the results. She believes it is now important to understand these neurological responses. "If we can understand the mechanism underlying this effect, we may be able to do something to intervene," Richeson, at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, told New Scientist.
William Gehring, at the University of Michigan, agrees that the study raises "critical issues" that should be addressed by future research on how races interact. "It is indisputable that prejudice exists, and the scientific study of its cognitive and neural underpinnings is exceedingly important," he writes in an article accompanying Richeson's paper in Nature Neuroscience.
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