“In Depth: Brains and Bias: The Neuroscience and Physiology Behind Bias and Decisionmaking"
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett (guest)
NACD Future Fluency Podcast, July 24, 2019
https://www.nacdonline.org/podcast/index.cfm?ItemNumber=60707
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This podcast explores the neuroscience behind bias, based on Dr. Barrett’s book, “How Emotions are Made”.
Here are some of my favorite insights.
People experience strong/intense feelings — whether pleasant or unpleasant — as certainty.
Our brains are guessing all the time. A lot of the time our guesses are pretty good. But sometimes they are pretty off base. But if the brain is guessing at the same time it’s having strong feelings, it’s experiencing strong sensations from the body, we experience that as a feeling of certainty.
It’s not that you see something and that leads you to believe something. It’s that you believe something to be true, and as a consequence that influences what you literally see.
We’ve demonstrated this in the lab time and time again. Unbeknownst to our test subjects, we can make them feel pleasant or unpleasant. And they literally see a person, an image of a neutral face, as being more or less competent, trustworthy, honest, as smiling more or scowling more, based on how we’ve manipulated those feelings.
In the lab, we can make people see guns that aren’t there just by make their environment more intense and putting a cell phone or other object in the hands of a man.
It’s not that we’re ignorant; it’s not that we don’t know how implicit bias works; it’s that we believe that we know certain things that actually aren’t true.
Brain activity in the amygdala increases when we are exposed to unusual things. Its job is to alert the rest of the brain when something is novel or uncertain. If you’re exposed to something unusual — a woman CEO, or in some parts of the country a dark face — you’ll have an increase in amygdala activity. It can make you feel jittery or unpleasant — not because you don’t like the person, but simply because your brain doesn’t know how to predict and is working extra hard as a result.
It’s easier to interact with people who are like you because your brain predicts extremely well. It’s less metabolically expensive, you don’t have a lot to learn, and it feels more comfortable.