A Dartmouth College study reveals that interracial contact has a profound impact on a person's attention and performance. The researchers found new evidence using brain imaging that white individuals attempt to control racial bias when exposed to black individuals, and that this act of suppressing bias exhausts mental resources.

The study combines the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity, with other behavioral tests common to research in social and cognitive psychology to determine how white individuals respond to black individuals.

"We were surprised to find that brain activity in response to faces of black individuals predicted how research participants performed on cognitive tasks after actual interracial interactions," says Jennifer Richeson, the lead author on the paper. "To my knowledge, this is the first study to use brain imaging data in tandem with more standard behavioral data to test a social psychological theory. We found that white people with higher scores on the racial bias measure experienced greater neural activity in response to the photographs of black males," says Richeson. "This heightened activity was in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area in the front of the brain that has been linked to the control of thoughts and behaviors. Plus, these same individuals performed worse on the cognitive test after an actual interaction with a black male, suggesting that they may have been depleted of the necessary resources to complete the task."

This new study by Richeson provides striking evidence that supports the idea that interracial contact temporarily impairs cognitive task performance. These results suggest, according to the researchers, that harboring racial bias in an increasingly diverse society may be bad for one's cognitive performance." >from *Interracial Interactions are Cognitively Demanding*. november 17, 2003

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Implicit bias distorts perception of facial cues so important to effective communication and perpetuates stereotypes. A self-fulfilling prophecy may be among the most troubling consequences. "If stereotypes color something as basic as face perception, then the downstream consequences may be considerable. Perceived hostility will at best promote avoidance -- or worse, may foster reciprocation."

Further research is needed to determine how perceptual bias in the first moments of contact might play themselves out over the course of social interaction, but current results suggest that negative dynamics will follow.

Experiments show how stereotypes can color our early and most immediate perceptions of other people. "We are constructing the meaning of other people's behavior on the basis of our attitudes and assigning stereotypical characteristics readily." From "Subconscious Bias Skews Perceptions." March 2, 2004
http://www.northwestern.edu/univ-relations/media_relations/releases/2004_03/bias.html