From: The Washington Post
Can science make you less sexist while you sleep?
The Washington Post:
No matter how open-minded you think you are, you’re chock-full of what scientists call implicit biases — prejudices you don’t even realize that you have that color your actions. But a fascinating new study suggests that these biases can be cut down in your sleep. By having subjects go through a bias-diminishing exercise just before taking a nap — during which the things they’d just learned were cued up by special sounds — researchers were able to lower their biases up to a week after the fact. The results were published Thursday in Science.
Xiaoqing Hu, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin, was working on ways to diminish implicit biases, like unconscious feelings of racism and sexism, when he happened to read an article on sleep research. Other scientists were finding evidence that sleep could help solidify and strengthen memories.
Read the whole story: The Washington Post
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Comments
As interesting as this was to read, it just sounds a little too nature vs nurture for my tastes. The claim that we all have these feelings subconsciously doesn’t seem very likely to me. I do like the idea of incorporating sleep persuasion into the equation though.
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