Even if we don’t think we have social biases, preconceptions we hold about other people can affect how we interact with them. These unconscious, implicit social biases have become more visible as social attitudes have changed and explicitly expressing racist or sexist attitudes has become unacceptable.
Scientists from Northwestern and Princeton have uncovered a mechanism by which sleep-based counter-bias and sound exposure that can reduce the effects of biases for up to one week after treatment. Given the current national discussion about racial biases, this finding has the potential to have real-life applications.
The scientists who conducted this study chose implicit social biases because they can be particularly difficult to change, even if an individual would like to. That’s in part because we’re mostly not aware that they’re there. Additionally, these biases are usually acquired over the course of several years of exposure to stereotypes and can therefore become strongly ingrained, making it hard to tap into them cognitively.
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