Most of us find that people from other races look more similar to each other than people from our own race - a phenomenon dubbed the 'other race effect'.
Sophie Lebrecht and colleagues reasoned that this perceptual bias could feed into people's implicit, non-conscious racial stereotypes. Now in an exciting new study they've shown that training people to distinguish among other-race faces can help reduce implicit racism.
Twenty White participants completed a test of their implicit racism towards African American people. As expected, the participants were quicker at identifying a negative word after presentation of an African American face than they were at identifying a positive word.
Half the students then received training in discriminating among African American faces, after which they re-took the implicit racism test and showed significantly reduced evidence of implicit racism. The other students, who acted as control group, were exposed to as many African American faces in the training period, but received no practice at discriminating among them. On re-tetesting, their implicit racism was unchanged.
The finding suggests that by improving people's ability to discriminate among other-race faces, their implicit racial biases can be reduced. This makes intuitive sense. After all, if people from a given race all seem to look alike, then it's not so hard to believe that they are similar in other ways too. In contrast, learning to see the visible differences between people of another race, makes it harder to lump them altogether in social and cultural ways.
"Our findings have great potential for how we understand and address the real-world consequences of racial stereotyping," the researchers said.
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Sophie Lebrecht, Lara J. Pierce, Michael J. Tarr, James W. Tanaka (2009). Perceptual Other-Race Training Reduces Implicit Racial Bias. PLoS ONE, 4 (1) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004215
译文:
学会区别异族外貌使我们战胜种族主义
大多数人都觉得其他种族的人似乎比我们自己种族的人看上去更相象，这种现象被称作异族效应。索菲莱布雷希特和他的同事们称这种知觉偏向导致了人们含蓄的，非意识性的种族成见。现在，一个新的研究表明训练人们识别其他种族人的外貌可以减少这种暗藏的种族主义。
20个白人参加者完成了一个关于他们对非裔美国人存有偏见的测试。正如所料，在介绍了一个非裔美国人后，参与者作出否定的有偏见意见的比肯定意见来的更快。
一半的学生之后就接受了区分非裔美国人外貌的训练，在那以后他们重新参加了种族主义测试，偏见明显减少了。其他对照组的学生没有接受区分他们外貌的训练，但仍然在这段期间观察这些非裔美国人，在重新测试时，他们的种族歧视还是没变。
这项研究表明提高人们鉴别其他种族人外貌的能力能使种族歧视减少。这是有自身道理的。毕竟，如果来自同一种族的人都长的很像，那么人们就会认为他们在其他方面也是一样的。相反，学会看到其他种族人的不同，那就不会在社会和文化方面也把他们混为一团。
研究人员说，“我们的研究对于我们如何理解和应付世界种族成见带来的后果有很大的帮助。”
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