If you identify with someone from another race, you become less racist. Natalie Sebanz, associate professor in CEU's Department of Cognitive Science, came to this conclusion by making it happen, in research published in the August 2013 edition of Cognition. Light-skinned participants were shown a dark-skinned hand, and with their own hand hidden from view, they began to feel the dark-skinned hand was their own. Racial bias dropped after the participants felt this identifying experience.
“Our results show that experiencing a dark-skinned hand as a part of your body reduces implicit negative attitudes towards people with dark skin, regardless of individual differences in initial racial attitudes or empathy,” Sebanz says. “That implies that attitudes can change through basic bodily experiences.”
This so-called rubber hand illusion test has proven before that people can identify strongly with a hand that isn’t their own – if the rubber hand is stabbed, the person’s skin reacts as if his/her own hand was threatened, for example. However, Sebanz’s study was one of the first to apply this phenomenon to the social issue of racial bias. Her research colleagues included her CEU colleague Guenther Knoblich, professor of cognitive science, as well as Lara Maister and Manos Tsakiris of the Laboratory of Action and Body in the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.
While the results are encouraging, showing that attitudes can change, important questions remain – that’s the bad news.
“We don’t know how long these effects on racial bias last,” Sebanz said. “At this point, we cannot say that this is some kind of easy fix.”
This study is part of Sebanz’s larger focus on joint action, i.e. how people work together. Take mimicry, for example. We know that this is a common human (and primate) behavior, and that we often use mimicry to learn new skills. Sebanz and her colleagues decided to look at how racial bias affects mimicry of joint actions.
In a study conducted in the Netherlands, people were shown dark-skinned hands, and told in some cases that the hands belonged to people from Morocco, and in other cases that the hands belonged to people from Suriname, a former Dutch colony with a significant, well-integrated population of immigrants in the Netherlands. Pairs of participants watched finger movements of the dark-skinned hands.
What was the outcome? Participants imitated the movements of the supposedly Surinamese hands to a huge extent. Mimicry of the Moroccan hands, by contrast, was zero.
In 2010, Sebanz received a European Young Investigator Award of over €1 million to be spent over five years on these and other projects concerning joint action. The award is comparable to a European Research Council Starting Grant and helps to shed new light on bodies in interaction.
