Racial bias has its roots in sensory perception

Racial bias has its roots in sensory perception

Black and white girls
Photo credit: Wayhome Studio, Adobe Photo Stock

People’s tendency to perceive members of their own racial group as different to each other and folks from other races as more homogenous could start early in the perceptual process, a new US study has found.

Intergroup bias is a well established psychological phenomenon that can result in stereotyping and discrimination, with real-world impacts ranging from the embarrassment of mixing two people up to the seriousness of selecting the wrong suspect from a police line-up.

But its cause is poorly understood. Brent Hughes, from the University of California, Riverside, and colleagues asked, “Are such mistakes based in errors of recollection and judgement, or do they emerge in the very way that we perceive members of other social groups?”

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Published by Cosmos Magazine.

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