The Young and the Neuro
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.”
- How do you think unconscious reactions might influence our interactions with others?
- In one study, when people were shown menacing faces, those whose parents were of lower social status showed more activation in the amygdala—the fear and emotion part of the brain—than people whose parents were of higher social status. What might this study suggest about how our upbringing and life experiences affect our emotional and physical reactions?
- Another study found that Americans activated the reward centers of the brain when engaging in dominant behavior, and Japanese activated the reward centers when engaging in subordinate behavior. How could studies such as this one help us to better understand words like “culture”? Do you think studies such as these could be helpful in enabling us to better understand people of different cultures?
- What do such studies suggest about our identities—as individuals, or as part of groups?
- Why do people make distinctions between “us” and “them”? Based on the article, what can be done to lessen these distinctions?
- Do studies such as these help explain why talking about issues of race can be difficult? How so?
- Brooks concludes that “the hard sciences are interpenetrating the social sciences.” What does he mean by this? What implications might this have for the future of science as a field? How might the research of social cognitive neuroscientists impact the way we understand ourselves and one another in the future?
The work of psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University, focuses on unconscious biases and their social consequences. Banaji heads the Project Implicit research group at Harvard and helps to maintain an online test—the Implicit Association Test (IAT)—which is designed to make people more aware of their unconscious biases. Click here to take the IAT.
