The Speculist

Racism Slows You Down

...mentally, that is. From NewScientist:

People with implicit racial prejudices are left mentally exhausted after interacting with someone from a different race, perhaps because they are trying to quell their feelings.

The new study, the first of its kind, shows that areas in the brain associated with self-control light up in white people with implicit racial biases when they are shown images of black people.

Furthermore, the study showed that the level of this brain activity correlated very closely with poor performance in a test of thinking ability given right after a face-to-face interview with a black person. The researchers believe this indicates that the subject's mental resources have been temporarily drained by their efforts to suppress their prejudices.

It turns out that prejudice is, quite literally, a waste of energy. People who use up their brain power on racial biases don't have enough left for higher functions.

"They are either trying to inhibit or control something - but we don't know what that something is," [one of the researchers] says. "It could be an emotional reaction, or thoughts that come to mind. Or it could be something as benign as simply trying not to make errors."

I'm a little disturbed by the methodology these researchers used to classify a subject as biased. The subjects (who were all white) were shown "white" and "black" names and asked whether they have positive or negative connotations. A subject taking too long to link a positive association with a "black" name would be considered biased. No overt hostility was required; the subject didn't have to link negative feelings to be considered biased. So the bias in question is not necessarily antagonism; any difficulty dealing with the "other" would apparently register as a bias. That's probably a more useful definition of racial bias than antagonism, anyway.

However, it seems kind of tautological to screen for bias by checking whether a subject slows down in making a decision when subjected to a particular stimulus, and then turn around and demonstrate that the subject is biased by the fact that the he or she slows down when subjected to a similar stimulus. Haven't we just proved that people who slow down under these circumstances...slow down under these circumstances? That's probably just my non-scientist reading of the article, which is written for a lay audience anyway. The rigor may be lost in translation. (Although the author of the NewScientist article does point out that this methodology is "controversial.")

Those reservations aside, I find the implications of this research quite compelling. If non-prejudiced people have more brain power left for other tasks, that should translate into a distinct competitive advantage. All things being equal, you're better off hiring a tolerant employee than a bigoted one, and not just for social or moral reasons. The tolerant employee will have more brain power available for doing work than the bigoted one. The less inhibited a group is by these kinds of biases, the more productive we can expect them to be. On a geopolitical scale, nations which have shed (or are shedding) these kinds of biases should get a tremendous economic boost. How many of the problems that haunt the Arab and Muslim world arise because so much mental energy is wasted on hating the enemy that there is little or none left for productive development?