Weird skin color illusion can reduce racism

[marble falls]

http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/stories/weird-skin-color-illusion-can-reduce-racism

Weird skin color illusion can reduce racism
An illusion that makes people feel that a rubber hand is their own can make white people less unconsciously biased against people with dark skin.
By: Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience
Tue, May 14, 2013 at 07:40 PM



Photo: ArTono/Shutterstock
Here's a novel way to reduce racism: Convince people their skin is darker than it really is.

No need to break out the tanning booth. A new study finds that an illusion that makes people feel that a rubber hand is their own can make white people less unconsciously biased against people with dark skin.

"It comes down to a perceived similarity between white and dark skin," study researcher Lara Maister, a psychologist at Royal Holloway University of London, said in a statement. "The illusion creates an overlap, which in turn helps to reduce negative attitudes because participants see less difference between themselves and those with dark skin."

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Race and the rubber hand
Maister and her colleagues wanted to know if using a rubber hand in a dark skin tone might influence the way white people perceived race. Previous studies have found that people's brains activate to mirror actions they watch other people doing; this effect is stronger when a person is watching someone of his or her own race and weakens when they see someone of another race.

Perhaps, the researchers thought, if people came to see a limb with darker skin as their own, they might perceive more overlap between themselves and someone of another race. To test the idea, they first recruited 34 Caucasian students to take part in the rubber hand illusion.

Because racism is generally frowned upon, psychologists can't always trust participants to be upfront about (or even aware of) their biases in questionnaires. To get around the problem, the researchers tested their participants' implicit racial biases. The volunteers were shown negative words, positive words and dark-skinned faces separately on a computer screen. They had to categorize the words as either "good" or "bad" by pressing a computer key.

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Reducing racism
After a few rounds of the implicit test to establish a baseline, the participants underwent the rubber hand illusion for two minutes with a dark-skinned rubber limb. Afterward, they were asked how strongly they felt the false hand was their own. Then they took the implicit racial bias test again.

The results revealed that the stronger the feeling of ownership over the dark-skinned hand, the less racially biased the participant was in the second test — regardless of their scores on round one.

In a second experiment, 69 more white participants completed the same tasks, but this time, some did the rubber hand illusion with a white hand and some with a dark hand. Again, ownership over the dark-skinned hand led to less racial bias, while ownership over the light-skinned hand changed nothing. The researchers reported their findings today (May 14) in the journal Cognition.

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Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

[1StrongBlackMan]

1. Posted to for later.

[yurbud]

2. It's too bad this doesn't work just from knowing real black or other non-white people

I teach community college and have lots of black, Latino, and even Muslim students, and it's hard to keep stereotypes alive when confronted with all the individual variation.

At most, someone's culture and/or skin color might tell you what they have been exposed to, but not what they have embraced or what their individual inclinations are.

[marble falls]

3. It has to do with empathy. It is possible to get people into other people's shoes.