Reuters Health eLine News
December 10, 2001 Monday 9:00 PM EST
Racism may be erasable:
BYLINE: By Merritt
LENGTH: 738 words
DATELINE: NEW YORK, Dec 10
Contrary to previous research, California scientists report
that the human mind may not be naturally wired to view other people
through the lens of ethnicity.
Instead, the brain may have started using ethnicity to
classify others not because of the physical differences in skin color, but
because ethnic differences were one of several ways to identify people who
belonged to competing groups.
"It is not inevitable that differences in physical
appearance will cause people to mentally group people into races," one of the study's authors, Dr. John
Tooby at the University of California at Santa Barbara, told Reuters
Ethnicity seems to become a compelling way to group people,
Tooby told Reuters Health, when racial aspects of appearance become
associated with a social alliance. In other words, he said, these features
become "politicized" because they represent membership in another group of
Previous research has found that the brain is hard-wired to
view new people in terms of sex, age and race, Tooby and
colleagues Drs. Robert Kurzban and Leda Cosmides note in a
report in the December 18th issue of the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences. This may be true for age and sex, but the
researchers challenge the idea that the brain is naturally wired to view
others in terms of ethnicity.
Tooby's team hypothesized that the brain was wired by
evolution to detect any visual sign of difference in a new person to tell
whether the individual was a part of the same group, and thus whether a
new person was an enemy or an ally. Since early humans rarely encountered
people of different races, the researchers thought it unlikely
that ethnicity would be wired into the brain. Instead, race is one of many visual clues that the
brain uses to tell whether another person is from the same group.
To test their idea, the researchers performed a set of
experiments that tested what factors people use to classify others into
groups, or alliances. The results of the study question the idea that
racial categorization is an automatic function of the brain.
Although people in the experiments were not completely
color-blind, they used ethnicity to categorize people much less often when
they were presented with other characteristics for matching people into
the appropriate group. The groups, or alliances, that participants viewed
were composed equally of blacks and whites.
What surprised Tooby and his colleagues was how quickly
people could change the way they grouped people, which took minutes rather
than years, he said.
"We had no idea it would be so fast," he said.
"I think most people think race consciousness is a
durable state of mind, rather than something that a new social context can
rapidly deflate," according to the California researcher.
Most people, Tooby said, probably think that consciousness
of ethnicity is rooted in physical appearance. But according to the
present study, "the politicization of groups" causes the mind to group
people based on appearance, Tooby noted. He pointed out that these signs
of appearance are just as likely to be clothing, manner or accent as
"While it is important not to put too much stock in any
single study in thinking about such a complex issue as race, this makes me personally far more
optimistic about how rapidly racism might be diminished than I had been
previously," Tooby concluded.
The next step, according to co-author Kurzban, is to
confirm the results of the study.
"The findings were surprising enough that we're interested
in trying to find other methods that arrive at the same conclusion," he
told Reuters Health in an interview.
The results of the study come from psychological
experiments, but there is some evidence that the same process works in the
real world, according to Tooby. He pointed out a recent article in The New
York Times that described how ethnic tensions in New York City seemed to
diminish after the September 11th attacks.
"Of course," Tooby pointed out, "there are happier ways of
redrawing social boundaries than the emergence of external enemies."
And changes in racial attitudes are not always positive. At
the same time that relationships between some racial groups improved, at
least temporarily, the Times article reported that many Americans began to
be suspicious of people of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent.
SOURCE: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences