How Our Brains Respond to Race

The Wall Street Journal:

When Barack Obama was elected president, there was talk of how America was becoming a post-racial society. Yet the news suggests abundantly that this is not the case. Why is progress on this issue so difficult? Recent research suggests that part of it has do with learning that occurs remarkably early in life.

Scientists have used neuroimaging to study the responses of our brains to faces of different races and have uncovered a disquieting result called the “other-race effect,” or ORE.

…

Writing in the Journal of Neuroscience in 2013, Eva Telzer of the University of Illinois and colleagues studied children adopted by European-American families from either Asian or Eastern European orphanages. Such orphanages are notorious for their under-stimulating environments, a facet of which is that their young wards never get exposed to other-race faces. Years later as American pre-adolescents, asked the researchers, do these children show a pronounced ORE?

Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal