What Neuroimaging Can Tell Us about Our Unconscious Biases
Neuroimaging research is beginning to give us more insight into the formation of our unconscious biases. Recent fMRI neuroscience studies demonstrate that people use different areas of the brain when reasoning about familiar and unfamiliar situations.
The amygdala is likely to activate as we walk down an unfamiliar dark alleyway and hear unexpected sounds or see a stranger walk towards us. It causes us to make assumptions about the threat level of the situation.Our conscious brain does not have the opportunity to interpret all the information that we see, so our initial instincts are less likely to be based on fully processed interpretations and often include biases of some kind.Social attitudes and expectations such as stereotypes can change how the brain processes information, and so brain-based differences in behavioural characteristics and cognitive skills change across time, culture.