Why Your Brain Only Cares About People Who Look Like You
While Black History Month may be over, racism lives on. Racism is pervasive and toxic, and one thing that makes it so insidious is how our brains are wired. Whenever I think about racism I’m reminded of a fascinating fMRI study on race and empathy. And while scientific publications usually have boring and confusing titles, this one was ominously titled “Their Pain is Not Our Pain.”
In this Italian study, researchers brought White men and Black men into the lab (Azevedo 2012). The participants all got put inside an fMRI machine and were shown short video clips of hands with White skin or Black skin. In each video the hand they saw would either be touched lightly with a Q-tip or jabbed painfully with a hypodermic needle.
Normally when you see someone experiencing pain, your brain has an automatic empathic reaction, particularly in a region called the insula. Your own pain circuits activate as you experience your own version of the other person’s pain. Not surprisingly, that’s what the researchers found in this study too … but only when participants observed people of the same race. When these men looked at the hand of a different race getting jabbed by a needle, they had decreased empathic brain activity.
That means if you’re White and you see a White hand getting poked with a syringe that automatically activates the insula. But seeing a Black hand getting poked with a needle doesn’t elicit the same response.
The same pattern held for the Black participants. So if you’re Black and see a Black hand getting poked with a needle, your insula activates more than seeing a White hand.
That does not seem like it bodes well for race relations. But there’s some good news! The size of the effect was not the same for everybody. The degree to which the brain responds to the pain of other races correlates with implicit racial bias.
If you’re not familiar with implicit racial bias, it’s the automatic associations that pop into your head when thinking about race. They happen extremely quickly and are often unconscious.
Think of a criminal. What color is the person who pops into your head? What about if you picture a college student (like the participants in this study)? Or a doctor? While these imaginary people could be of any race, implicit racial bias makes it easier to associate positive attributes with one race and negative attributes with another. For example, if you’re biased towards White people, you’ll be more likely to associate White people with positive concepts like “success.” And you’ll be more likely to associate Black people with negative concepts, like “crime”.
The higher your implicit racial bias, the more your brain’s empathy circuit only cares about the pain of people who look like you. By contrast, people with low implicit racial bias have empathy circuits that respond to everyone’s pain. You can test your own implicit racial bias with this online test from Harvard University: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatouchtest.html (It offers other tests as well so you can also test your biases about gender, age, or disability).
You’ll probably be surprised at your biases. Almost everyone has them to some extent. But does that mean we’re all doomed to live in a racist society? Fortunately no.
First of all, implicit racial bias IS NOT RACISM. Racism is about one race using power to oppress another. It’s not a thought or feeling. And the brain’s automatic bias is not about whether you’re a good person or not. Implicit racial bias is mostly about the types of people you regularly interact with, or demographics of the neighborhood you grew up in. It’s also about the views on race you hear from your family and friends, and the messages you get from the media and the broader culture. But it poses a race-relations problem in a multicultural society if we just automatically feel empathy for people of our own race and less so for people of other races.
Empathy exists to help us take pro-social actions: actions that benefit the groups and societies we’re a part of. When I feel your pain like I feel my own pain, I’m more likely to take action to help you. So if you don’t feel another person’s pain as intimately, you’re less likely to take action to help, or even care about it in the first place.
But just because your brain might have an automatic bias programmed by your childhood or the media or your current environment, doesn’t mean you have to follow it. Feeling empathically and acting compassionately are totally different things. It actually doesn’t matter if you “feel” someone else’s pain or not, you can still take action to help.
Even better, studies show you can actually change your automatic biases (Lai 2014). One way is to learn about successful people of other races who challenge stereotypes. Try reading books or watching shows about people who look different than you. The effects aren’t long lasting though – it takes times to change years of cultural influence on your brain – so don’t think it’s an easy fix (Lai 2016). This clearly won’t solve institutional racism, but on an individual level, it’s a step in the right direction.
You can even fake it ‘til you make it. You don’t have to have pure thoughts to be a good person. It’s ok to have bias. It’s almost impossible not to. The key is to be aware of your automatic biases and not let them guide your actions or how you treat others.
Without awareness you’ll just robotically follow the implicit biases programmed into you. Your feelings of empathy, or lack thereof, can easily lead to inaction in the face of racial injustice. But with a little self-awareness you can instead start living your values with intention, and push back more strongly against racism.
One simple way to take action: talk to someone about what you learned about bias or share this article with a friend.
References:
Azevedo, R. T., Macaluso, E., Avenanti, A., Santangelo, V., Cazzato, V., & Aglioti, S. M. (2013). Their pain is not our pain: brain and autonomic correlates of empathic resonance with the pain of same and different race individuals. Human brain mapping, 34(12), 3168-3181.
Lai, C. K., Marini, M., Lehr, S. A., Cerruti, C., Shin, J. E. L., Joy-Gaba, J. A., … & Nosek, B. A. (2014). Reducing implicit racial preferences: I. A comparative investigation of 17 interventions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(4), 1765.
Lai, C. K., Skinner, A. L., Cooley, E., Murrar, S., Brauer, M., Devos, T., … & Nosek, B. A. (2016). Reducing implicit racial preferences: II. Intervention effectiveness across time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(8), 1001.
