New Tool Helps Blunt Racial Bias

Increasing people’s awareness of facial feature differences within a specific race is often the first step to reducing racial bias. A new measurement tool and protocol developed by researchers at Brown University and the University of Victoria could someday be used to reduce unconscious racial stereotypes.

Jim Tanaka, a cognitive scientist at the University of Victoria, and his research group have developed a training protocol to improve people’s ability to recognize other-race faces. The current project incorporated a new test of racial bias developed by Sophie Lebrecht and Michael Tarr at Rhode Island’s Brown University.

Dubbed the Affective Lexical Priming Score (ALPS), subjects are shown a series of pictures of different races. After each photo of a face, subjects saw a word that could be real (“chair”) or nonsense (“malk”). Subjects had to differentiate between the nonsense and real words—which could have a negative or positive implication.

Initially, subjects responded more quickly if a negative word followed an African-American face and more slowly if a positive word followed an African-American face.

After using ALPS to measure each subject’s implicit racial bias, the subjects took part in 10 hours of Tanaka’s facial recognition training program in which they were trained to tell African American faces apart. Subjects in the control group simply categorized the faces as African American or not. “Even though the amount of raw perceptual exposure was identical in both groups,” says Tanaka, “we found that those who learned how to differentiate African American faces as individuals showed the greatest improvement in their ability to recognize new African American faces and a reduction in racial bias as measured by ALPS.”

This training method has great promise for teaching people how to differentiate individuals within a race rather than consider them to be all members one racial group. In doing so, says Tanaka, racial stereotypes may be diminished.

The results of the study are in PLoS ONE, the online, peer-reviewed journal from the US-based Public Library of Science. Tanaka also collaborated with his former undergraduate student Lara Pierce, now a graduate student at McGill University.

The study, Perceptual Other-Race Training Reduces Implicit Racial Bias, is available at http://www.plosone.org/home.action

Funding for the study came from the Perceptual Expertise Network, a collaborative award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation; the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center at the University of California–San Diego; the National Science Foundation, a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada award; and a Brown University National Eye Institute training grant (the National Institutes of Health).
 

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