Podcast extra: The question of brain bias
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What does brain bias look like when we assume someone is different?
This is an ABC podcast.
Hi, Lynne Malcolm here with a Podcast Extra interview for you. In this conversation, we explore brain bias and prejudice. The global Black Lives Matter movement has recently highlighted the extent of prejudice and racial bias across the world's societies. So what happens in our brains when we make assumptions about people who don't seem to be like us, when they may look, speak or behave differently? Does society condition us to have less feeling or empathy for people we don't consider to be part of our group? And could brain science help us to override our prejudices? To explore some of these questions, I'm speaking with Lasana Harris, who's Associate Professor in Experimental Psychology at University College London.
His research is in social neuroscience, specifically looking at how we perceive other people, as well as animals and other things outside ourselves. He explained to me how he became interested in this area.
completely by accident. Initially, I was interested in emotions and how people felt when they encountered other people. And that led me to investigating what we call social cognition. So the idea of getting inside somebody's head. So when we encounter other people, presumably one of the things that we always do is we think about their minds. We try to get inside of their head to know something about their thoughts, feelings, personality, and the like. And so By studying emotions, it led me to really study this very interesting cognitive process. Now most of my work focuses on that cognitive process, specifically what I call boundary conditions of it, so cases where we encounter other people but fail to think about their minds, and cases where we encounter things that aren't people but attribute minds to them.
Social cognition is the term used to describe the way we perceive others. And I wondered whether this is something we're born with or whether it develops through childhood.
This is actually a very hotly debated topic in that literature. But basically, the idea is that children are born with the rudimentary skills necessary to engage in social cognition. But what they do at a very early age isn't what we're doing as adults. And so they have these very basic skills. And then slowly over the first 18 months or so of life, it begins unfolding itself. So initially, children are able, for instance, to tell their mother apart from other types of people. So they're able to sort of physically distinguish human beings from everything else. And what's interesting is that children build on these very early perceptual abilities. So infants in particular are much more attuned to what they're seeing, and they rely on this information a lot more than adults.
Now, what happens by the time we become adults is we use visual cues still, but we're doing what we call an inference process. So we're essentially aggregating a lot of information to allow us to figure out what somebody's thinking. But children aren't necessarily doing that because that's a higher level cognitive skill that isn't quite developed. But by sort of using these early rudimentary perceptual skills, they're able to tap into what we would call social or cultural norms.
How does social cognition develop from infancy to adulthood?
So they're able to see what people tend to do in different situations. They're able to see a variety of emotional expression, for instance, and distinguish amongst them. And so very slowly over time, they build up this skill. What's really interesting, though, is that children are what we would call wild anthropomorphizers. So anthropomorphism is this ability to and for the mind of something that doesn't really have a mind. And it seems like kids are doing this very widespread from very early on in life. And so they don't just reserve thinking about minds for other people. They're doing it for imaginary creatures, right? There's a monster under the bed, that type of stuff. And that imaginative process gets refined over time.
And so children learn through their socialization about which entities out there in the world really do have minds and which don't have minds.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does brain bias look like when we assume someone is different?
0:02–3:46
2
How does social cognition develop from infancy to adulthood?
3:46–6:23
3
Why do adults keep anthropomorphising objects, animals and technology?
6:23–10:00
4
What is dehumanisation and how is it linked to everyday bias?
10:00–13:45
5
How do the amygdala and neocortex interact to create racial prejudice?
13:45–17:00
6
Can awareness and cultural learning help us override unconscious bias?
17:00–20:03
7
What structural changes are needed to reduce systemic bias?
20:03–23:26
8
Why is social psychology facing replication challenges and how is it improving?
23:26–27:01