All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Our unconscious biases and stereotypes can "influence our brain's visual systems", meaning that we may perceive people's faces in ways that "conform to these stereotypes".
Researchers at New York University say that their findings "provide evidence that the stereotypes we hold can systematically alter the brain's visual representation of a face". "It can distort what we see to be more in line with our biased expectations," says Jonathan Freeman, senior author of the paper, which has been published in Nature Neuroscience.
Most of the stereotypes that affect our visual perception are unconscious – so we may not even realise we have them. For example, researchers say, we may not consciouslythink that men are "more aggressive" or women "more appeasing", but we perceive them to be unconsciously. "Many individual have ingrained stereotypes – though they may not endorse those stereotypes personally," said Freeman. "Our results suggest that these sorts of stereotypical associations can shape the basic visual processing of other people, predictably warping how the brain ‘sees’ a person’s face."
The researchers monitored brain activity with fMRI scanners while participants viewed male and female faces and the faces of those of different races. Each of these faces was expressing a different emotion. Participants were then asked to make "split-second decisions" about these faces in an attempt to "uncover a less conscious preference through their hand-motion trajectory".
Despite previously surveyed conscious perceptions, the tests revealed that men – particularly black men – were perceived as angry, even when their facial expressions were not angry, and women's faces were perceived as happy even when they were neutral. "The extent of this stereotypical similarity in neural-activation patterns was correlated with the extent of bias observed in a subject’s hand movements," the team write in their paper. "For example, the extent to which a subject’s hand initially veered toward the “angry” response when categorising a non-angry black male face predicted the extent to which neural-activation patterns for black male faces and angry faces were more strongly correlated in the subject’s fusiform cortex." "Previous studies have shown that how we perceive a face may, in turn, influence our behaviour," said Ryan Stolier, co-lead author of the research. "Our findings therefore shed light upon an important and perhaps unanticipated route through which unintended bias may influence interpersonal behaviour."
The team hope that their research could be used to "develop better interventions to reduce or possibly eliminate unconscious biases". "The findings highlight the need to address these biases at the visual level as well, which may be more entrenched and require specific forms of intervention," said Freeman. "his visual bias occurs the moment we glimpse at another person, well before we have a chance to correct ourselves or regulate our behaviour."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
