Political, racial and religious prejudice causes conflicts on all continents. Miles Hewstone, Ed Cairns and Rhiannon Turner describe their latest research

From neighbourhoods to neurones

Miles Hewstone unpicks the connections

It is an exciting time to be studying prejudice because modern methods of research can tell us something about people’s prejudice even when they won’t own up to it.

So-called implicit measures of prejudice tap unconscious expressions of bias, beyond the perceiver’s awareness or intention. Prejudice – an unjustifiable negative attitude towards a group and its individual members – may be out of sight, but not out of mind. For example, the ‘implicit association test’ (IAT), has consistently shown stronger mental associations between ‘black’ and ‘bad’, and ‘white’ and ‘good’. This is not necessarily prejudice, but it may lead to it, and it seems to be a bias that we should be made aware of, so that we can control our responses accordingly.

Contact between groups

We can study prejudice at the neighbourhood level by investigating the extent to which members of different groups live apart or together, and whether this matters. Extensive research shows that contact between members of different groups is typically associated with a significant reduction in prejudice.

Positive, high-quality contact is associated with a reduction in anxiety, an increase in empathy and the ability to take the perspective of people in the other group. Somewhat paradoxically, contact is most effective when members of both groups involved are aware of their respective group memberships; they are then more likely to generalize from the positive encounter with one or two members of the out-group to the out-group in general.

Brain activity

We can also study prejudice using the neurone approach, which looks at activity in people’s brains when they display prejudice. A number of recent studies have reported findings linking prejudice and activity in the amygdala, a brain structure which has a clear role in response to stimuli that signal danger or threat.

One study found a correlation between activation of the amygdala in white participants, in response to unknown black faces, and their implicit racial prejudice, measured by the IAT. When participants viewed faces of famous and well-liked black and white individuals, however, there was no consistent pattern of amygdala activation to the black vs. white faces, and no relation between the IAT task and amygdala activation. These findings suggest that social learning shapes the activity of the social brain.

A necessary combination

Combining the two approaches is the best way to advance our understanding of prejudice. Some of our own recent work at Oxford has compared white people’s reactions to different-race faces showing positive, negative or neutral emotions. We found that white participants who reported experience of getting to know blacks as individuals showed less pronounced neural responses to the combination of black face + angry emotion. Neighbourhood really did affect neurones!

Miles Hewstone is Professor of Psychology at Oxford University