Reducing Prejudice While You Sleep
Pacific Standard:
Prejudices tend to lurk in our unconscious minds. Few Americans would admit to holding stereotyped views of blacks or women, but tests designed to measure underlying thought patterns suggest the presence of buried biases that still influence our opinions and behavior.
The good news is these harmful assumptions are learned, and they can be unlearned. Newly published research suggests such biases can be diminished with the help of the simplest and most natural process imaginable: Sleep.
A research team led by psychologists Ken Paller of Northwestern University and Xiaoqing Hu of the University of Texas-Austin reports it was able to able to reduce prejudice through a combination of conscious brain training and subliminal reinforcement as the study participants napped.
Read the whole story: Pacific Standard
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