Levels of unconscious racist and sexist bias have been reduced by manipulating the way the brain learns during sleep.
A team at Northwestern University, Chicago, played sounds while people slept to trigger and enforce memories of an exercise earlier in the day.
The trial on 40 people, published in the journal Science, showed the changes lasted at least a week.
Experts said the findings had potential in many situations, but also raised ethical questions.
Sexual and racial prejudice are common but may often be unintentional, says the Northwestern team.
They cite studies in computer games when people chose to shoot black characters more often than white ones or men being favoured over women despite having identical job applications.
Breaking bias?
People’s prejudices were assessed with a series of publicly available tests at the start of the study.
They were then given “counter-bias training”. During the session, pictures of faces were paired with words that were the opposite of widely-held stereotypes.
So female faces were paired with words like “maths” or black faces with positive words like “sunshine”.
Distinctive sounds were played during the counter-bias training and were played again at low volume during a 90-minute afternoon nap.
The result was a reduction in sexual and racial bias scores, which persisted for at least a week.
So could this really make someone less sexist or racist?
Prof Ken Paller, the director of the cognitive neuroscience programme at Northwestern University, told the BBC News website: “We didn’t have people interact with or make decisions about other people, so that sort of experiment is needed to know the full effects of the methods we used.
“But we suggest that modifying unconscious social bias is likely to influence the extent to which decisions are influenced by racist or sexist attitudes.”
* It was posted on reddit, and amusingly all the top comments were deleted.
* Trigger Alert!!
Nausea and panic triggered by listening to Ludwig van Beethoven are unfortunate side effects of the new anti-racism therapy.
* I like to listen to Ludwig Van and then I associate it with a little of the old Ultraviolence.
* The therapy might get rid of your prejudices while you’re asleep, but if you live in a diverse neighbourhood you should have them back again by 10 a.m.
* The real interesting thing in these new techniques is usually buried in the fine print–they don’t actually eliminate the “enemy” or the subject’s response to a perceived “enemy”–they simply change the identity of the enemy. I think it is very cool that all these governments are investing big bucks in learning how to manipulate people’s natural biases in order to make them perceive group X or group Y as the “real” enemy, basically, whoever the government wants them to irrationally hate and fear. Very practical.
* Why would I want to reduce my racism and sexism? It has taken many years of thoughtlessly noticing to acquire them.
* OT: UC Merced stabber was one Faisal Mohammad, a freshman STEM student, who also carried items in his backpack which this article says are “poor man’s explosives”. ISIS praises his actions in a tweet, but the police and media are quick to deny any terrorism link, claiming he was driven by personal animosities, not a political agenda.
* If these types of training had long term benefits, everyone could all throw away their painkiller, antidepressant, Lithium and Ritalin subscriptions and simply watch meditation videos on YouTube. Unfortunately in the real world these types of “brain training” techniques rarely have long term benefits.
* Why do we so readily assume that prejudices are bad and need to be ‘eradicated’, altered or diminished? I thought the power to discriminate was one of the salient and refined features of humans. If that is so, why are we so persistent in laying waste to it; we should encourage it, I should say.
