Modern Racism Scale, fMRI, and Mental privacy

By: http://www.chocolatecity.cc/blog

In scan 1, a subject is asked to remember a face. In scan 2, the subject is asked to "think about this face.", In scans 3 and 4, the subject was asked to compare another face to the remembered face.

A man’s personal and non-communicable thoughts about what he would like to do with his very attractive sister-in-law should always be his, especially when he prefers to keep those thoughts to himself, never persuade them and take them to his grave. It is even more important that we ourselves are not always certain what it is that we are thinking because so much of what occurs in the brain is beyond our conscious awareness, much less our control. Things may be changing more rapidly than anyone realizes.

Well, your personal though might not be personal for too long. If its left with some scientist, your personal thoughts will be recorded in a folder or on some kind of media at a government agency or on a corporate office’s HR department hard drive.

fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) is an improved technology that gives researchers ever more information about what is going on in our brain. They know which regions "light up" when people are thinking about certain things. They know where in the brain activity increases or decreases when people experience certain emotions. This amazing development and improvement by scientists to use fMRI to map out brain structures and detect the presence or absence of brain activity in specific regions is opening a can of worm regarding mental privacy.

A team of researchers from NYU and Yale published a study that uses fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) that suggested people may indeed harbor unconscious racism and that it can be detected. A group of white students who reported no conscious racism had their brains scanned while being shown both familiar and unfamiliar faces, some white and some black.

The study consisted of two experiments. In the first, 14 White subjects (males and females) were placed in an MRI scanner and asked to view pictures of unfamiliar Black and White male faces with neutral expressions. For each picture, subjects were asked to press one button if the picture was the same as the preceding picture and another if the picture was different.

The researchers found that the strength of this amygdala activity to the unfamiliar Black versus White faces was related to unconscious social evaluation. Amygdala, is a region associated with emotional learning and which registers fear, when the students were shown unfamiliar black faces – an increase that did not occur with familiar black faces or unfamiliar white faces. The stronger the activation in the amygdala, the stronger the bias on the test of association between race (Black-White) and evaluation (good-bad) and the degree to which subjects startled in the presence of Black versus White faces. These are two behavioral measures that are not under an individual’s direct, conscious control. In contrast to these correlations, there was no relation between amygdala activation and conscious racial attitudes as assessed with the Modern Racism Scale. Are these students unconsciously racists? Perhaps, if we define racism broadly enough, but at the very least, they have the seeds of racial prejudice which could become actual racism in how they treat unfamiliar black people and they aren’t even be consciously aware of it.

There is the issue of mental privacy and the potential for abuse especially since lots of interested parties are awaiting the day when fMRI becomes the norm. Uncle Sam is not the only interested party, corporations are eager to used this technology for marketing research, and homophobic test. The legal system could used it as a reliable lie detector, for murder cases, and civil cases to name a few.

Yale Psychologist Mahzarin Banaji commented, "Evaluation in the common sense, that is, conscious evaluation, shows increases in positive regard among White Americans toward Black Americans. Yet, as social psychologists have documented for over a decade, implicit or unconscious evaluations continue to remain more negative. Unless one is socially isolated, it is not possible to avoid acquiring attitudes toward social groups. Yet, such evaluations can affect behavior in subtle and unintentional ways, showing a disturbing dissociation between our conscious values and beliefs and our less conscious, implicit preferences and evaluations.

NYU Neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps said, "These results are significant because they link implicit measures of racial evaluation to neural mechanisms known to be important in everyday emotional learning and memory. In this study we chose to focus on the amygdala because of its known role in emotional learning and evaluation. We found that a given subject’s amygdala activity in response to unfamiliar Black versus White faces is related to his or her performance on indirect measures of race evaluation. However, these results do not indicate that the amygdala ’causes’ these behaviors. From these data, we cannot specify a particular behavioral function for the observed amygdala activation. The neural systems underlying implicit racial evaluation, and social group evaluation in general, are most likely extensive and expand beyond the amygdala. This work is a first step in our understanding of the neural basis of racial group evaluation."

Phelps and Banaji offered the following, "Our interpretation of the present study is that both amygdala activation as well as behavioral responses of race evaluation are reflections of social learning. It is common to think of the relationship between the brain and behavior as a one-way street, with brain function leading to behavior. This simple interpretation misses the complex interaction between the brain, behavior and experience. Just as behavior changes with experience, so does the brain. Widespread cultural evaluations of Black and White Americans, personal experiences with members of these groups, and one’s own membership in these groups can all contribute to the magnitude of race evaluation bias. As our work shows, these experiences are also reflected in neural activity, as these measures are correlated.

In addition, we warn against interpretation of these results or measures as indicators of ‘racism.’ The measures used in this research should not and cannot be assumed to be a battery of tests that can be used to reveal an individual’s hidden racism. It would be improper to use them in any selection or diagnostic context."

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