The Neuroscience of Racism Can brain science help to understand one of society’s most complex problems?
Many people might be asking themselves why some people would perpetrate crimes against other human beings just because they belong to a different ethnic group. Can brain science help provide an answer? Here are the main insights:
- How we categorize others
- How we perceive the actions of others
- How we feel empathy towards somebody else
- How we perceive faces
Racism is a highly complex problem, not only on the societal level but also in the brain. There is no single brain area involved in racism.The existence of this network and its sometimes automatic and subconscious activation is probably rooted in our ancient pastLike many phenomena in evolutionary psychology, however, these processes could lead to problems in today’s society because conditions.
Today are very different from the prehistoric conditions that shaped our brain structure. The fast and subconscious processes that lead to a potentially negative emotional reaction to faces of people belonging to a different ethnic group can be regulated by later conscious control processes.