A New Tool to Blunt Racial Bias
Posted by Carolan Gladden at 3/22/2009 4:18 PM 
Categories: Passions, science, People, Black and White, Ideas
Categories: Passions, science, People, Black and White, Ideas
Part of my job at UC San Diego -- a large part and one I'm passionate about -- is taking narrative reports written by scientists on a variety of research projects and rendering a chosen few understandable and interesting to people with no technical training.
The finished projects generally appear within ONTime, the online newsletter of the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center http://tdlc.ucsd.edu/portal or as a Research Profile on the website of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind http://kibm.ucsd.edu
A study that just came my way sported a mind-blowing title: A New Tool to Blunt Racial Bias, and I knew I had to write abut this ...
Starting from the idea that there's a strong connection between the way people perceive and categorize the world and the way they end up making stereotypes and generalizations about social entities, this research group devised the Affective Lexical Priming Score (ALPS) testing system.
In the inaugural study, 20 Caucasian subjects were shown a series of grey-scale images of the faces of people of different races, each photo disappearing and being replaced by nonsense letters or a real word with either a positive or negative connotation. The initial testing generally revealed quicker response to negative words related to African-American faces, slower response when positive words were coupled with African-American faces.
After the ALPS measured their implicit racial bias, the subjects took part in some ten hours of facial recognition training where half learned to tell whether the faces were African-American or not and half learned to tell apart individual African-American faces. And then when they were re-tested with ALPS, those who showed the great improvement in their ability to differentiate between the faces also showed the greatest reduction in implicit racial bias.
Sophie Lebrecht, a PhD student at Brown, conceived of the study and says she hopes that the program may someday be used to train police officers, social workers, immigration officials, etc. In addition, my fervent wish is that such teaching methods filter into the general population with the result of fewer incorrect witness identifications and erroneous convictions.
Positively,
Carolan
The finished projects generally appear within ONTime, the online newsletter of the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center http://tdlc.ucsd.edu/portal or as a Research Profile on the website of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind http://kibm.ucsd.edu
A study that just came my way sported a mind-blowing title: A New Tool to Blunt Racial Bias, and I knew I had to write abut this ...
Starting from the idea that there's a strong connection between the way people perceive and categorize the world and the way they end up making stereotypes and generalizations about social entities, this research group devised the Affective Lexical Priming Score (ALPS) testing system.
In the inaugural study, 20 Caucasian subjects were shown a series of grey-scale images of the faces of people of different races, each photo disappearing and being replaced by nonsense letters or a real word with either a positive or negative connotation. The initial testing generally revealed quicker response to negative words related to African-American faces, slower response when positive words were coupled with African-American faces.
After the ALPS measured their implicit racial bias, the subjects took part in some ten hours of facial recognition training where half learned to tell whether the faces were African-American or not and half learned to tell apart individual African-American faces. And then when they were re-tested with ALPS, those who showed the great improvement in their ability to differentiate between the faces also showed the greatest reduction in implicit racial bias.
Sophie Lebrecht, a PhD student at Brown, conceived of the study and says she hopes that the program may someday be used to train police officers, social workers, immigration officials, etc. In addition, my fervent wish is that such teaching methods filter into the general population with the result of fewer incorrect witness identifications and erroneous convictions.
Positively,
Carolan
As a grad student myself, this study not only showed what a little persistence and positive reinforcement can do to do away with the stereotypical thinking that may formulate in the minds of the dominant culture individuals.
In fact this subject may be explored by me as I progress through the maze of research subjects and topics that raise a passion within me to get a clearer understanding of the subject matter.
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