Undoing the damaging social biases that dwell within our unconscious minds is a challenge that is a complex task by any standard. Yet, new research suggests that tackling this challenge in our sleep is a highly effective strategy.
Focusing on unconscious biases involving race and gender, researchers attempted to unravel potentially harmful stereotypes by tapping into the processes that go on in our brains while we sleep. They report in a study published in the journal Science on May 28 that this strategy not only dramatically reduced these biases immediately after the intervention but also produced lasting effects.
"Normally, when people return to their normal lives, these biases return because we are exposed to the environmental factors that reinforced the biases originally," lead author Xiaoqing Hu of the University of Texas at Austin said in an interview. "But when they returned, the bias was still reduced.
Hu and his colleagues accomplished this feat by pairing images that go against harmful stereotypes with specific sounds. They chose to target biases that prevent women from entering careers in science as well as biases that foster negative attitudes toward black people. They measured the study participants' initial levels of these biases using an Implicit Association Test, a standard measure of unconscious or implicit bias (you can take the test for yourself here).
"Because of these realistic concerns, we are particularly interested in studying these two types of biases," Hu says.
During the learning phase of the study, participants saw images of female faces paired with words associated with math or science and black faces paired with positive words. When the women + science images appeared, the participants heard a particular sound. When the black + positive images appeared, the participants heard a different sound.
Then, it was time for a nap. Once the study participants were fast asleep, the researchers played one of the two sounds they heard while they were learning counter-bias information from the image pairs, but did not tell them they did so.
"After they woke up, we measured their implicit bias again and found that if we play the sound cue that bias is reduced by almost 50 percent after the nap," says Hu.
The researchers then sent the participants back out into our bias-ridden world and asked them to return a week later. Upon their return to the lab, they took the Implicit Association Test again. Remarkably, their levels of implicit bias were still about 20 percent lower on average than they were before the intervention.
Further research on this strategy is needed to determine whether it can reduce the harm imposed by implicit biases in real world situations, Hu notes. Still, he sees potential for applying the strategy for a variety of interventions.
"Previous research conceptualizes social biases as bad habits, and we think we can now use this sort of intervention to change other bad habits, like smoking," he says.
The findings of the study are detailed in the journal Science.
Photo: Seniju | Flickr
