In a recent New York Times article titled “The Young and the Neuro,” David Brooks looks at the growing field of social cognitive neuroscience—a field that is attracting many young scholars. Social cognitive neuroscientists “study the way biology, in the form of genes, influences behavior. But they’re also trying to understand the complementary process of how social behavior changes biology.” Studies have shown that “we divide people by in-group and out-group categories in as little as 170 milliseconds,” but if people are given a strategy, such as “reminding them to be racially fair,” then those perceptions can be counteracted. In other words, Brooks writes, “consciousness is too slow to see what happens inside, but it is possible to change the lenses through which we unconsciously construe the world.”
Science and Medical Ethics
Facing Today helps educators connect the study of history to issues in our world today. We select current websites, articles, films and blogs that reflect universal themes, such as identity, membership and participation, represented in our scope and sequence. Each media resource is linked to related Facing History materials, including study guides, videos and lessons.
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October 16, 2009
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September 29, 2009
In a New York Times essay titled “Finding a Scapegoat When Epidemics Strike,” Donald G. McNeil Jr. looks at how, throughout history, some group always seems to get blamed for the spread of a pandemic disease. Dr. Liise-anne Pirofski, chief of infectious diseases at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, explained that “ ‘when disease strikes and humans suffer . . . the need to understand why is very powerful. And, unfortunately, identification of a scapegoat is sometimes inevitable.’ ”
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June 6, 2008
In the research article, "Imaging Race" (American Psychologist , Feb-Mar 2005), Stanford University psychologist Jennifer L. Eberhardt describes how brain imaging reveals "the neurobiological effects of people's racial beliefs, attitudes, and knowledge in a manner that appears to highlight (both to scientists and to laypeople) the socially constructed nature of race." While in the past, science, especially neuroscience, had been used to reinforce racial stereotypes and hierarchies, today neuroscience may be a tool to break down racist beliefs that lead to discrimination.
