The Brain Fires Differently in Reaction to Race

Different ethnicities elicit various responses

In a new study from researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough, scientists reveal that the human brain fires differently when an individual sees another person from outside his or her own ethnic group or race. The investigation was meant to gage how the mirror-neuron-system functions when exposed to cues coming from people different from the test subjects. During the study, the participants were hooked up to electroencephalogram (EEG) machines, while they viewed videos showing short video clips of men and women from outside their race or ethnic group, ScienceDaily reports.

Social neuroscientists have known for a long time that the brain must respond differently when exposed to such cues, and some have even proposed that this, in combination with other brain mechanisms, may offer some of the foundation for racism and discrimination. During the experiments, the participants, all of which were White, were asked to watch short video clips in which White, African American, South Asian and East Asian men picked up a glass of water, and then took a sip from it.

In previous researches, it was revealed that, when people look at others performing a task, a region of their brain called the motor cortex begins to fire in very much the same patterns as when they perform the actions themselves. But the new investigation reveals that this is only true when individuals relate to actions performed by people of the same race or ethnicity as their own. When participants looked at the video clips depicting minorities, their motor cortex exhibited a lot less activity than when they watched a White man doing the same thing.

In some instances, the level of activity was similar to when they were watching a blank screen. “Previous research shows people are less likely to feel connected to people outside their own ethnic groups, and we wanted to know why What we found is that there is a basic difference in the way peoples' brains react to those from other ethnic backgrounds. Observing someone of a different race produced significantly less motor-cortex activity than observing a person of one's own race. In other words, people were less likely to mentally simulate the actions of other-race than same-race people,” explains PhD student Jennifer Gutsell, the leader of the new research.