Scientists at Northwestern University have discovered that it may be possible for people to “unlearn” racial and gender biases — while they sleep.
Xiaoqing Hu, who led the study, said that playing auditory cues while people slept help them to score better on a test that measured inherent bias based on race and gender, and best of all, the results were evident even up to a week later.
The results countered a belief that low levels of exposure to this unlearning process are typically inefficient, according to Hu. “The usual expectation is that a brief, one-time intervention is not strong enough to have a lasting influence,” he explained.
In some cases, these could be prejudices that people don’t know they have, known as “implicit biases.” This differs from more overt cases of racism or gender discrimination, which people tend to think of when they hear about prejudices.
For instance, one such incident that took place in Orlando involved a 51-year-old white bar owner threatening two black patrons with a gun. The customers, both in their twenties, said that the owner of the Orlando George and Dragon British Pub yelled racial slurs and threw a glass at them before pulling out a shotgun and threatening to shoot both of them.
Yet racism often comes down to small daily incidents, called microaggressions, which is a term coined by Chester Pierce in 1978 and defined as “subtle, stunning, often automatic, and nonverbal exchanges, which are ‘put downs’ of Blacks by offenders” to explain less often recognized racist behavior.
Other studies have examined these prejudices before, such as Project Implicit out of Harvard University. The online test has shown that 80% of people are biased against elderly faces, and many often have a preference for white faces over black faces based on how they view the moods of those in photographs.
One study, which asked participants to play a video game and only shoot armed people, revealed that players were still more likely to shoot unarmed black characters in the game. Another study suggested that professors who write recommendation letters often give preferences to junior male researchers over their female students, which could affect employment later on.
Hu’s study, published in Science, involved two parts — one that showed female faces next to words linked to math or science and another that showed black faces accompanied by pleasant words. Each part of the study played two distinct sounds, each associated with gender and race pairs.
Participants then took a 90-minute nap where one of the sounds was played repeatedly without them knowing about it.
Those who slept and heard the sound experienced a lower rate of bias, reduced by 56%; in another part of the study in which the participants did not hear any of the sounds, they experienced the same amount of bias they did before their nap. One week later, their bias scores remained reduced by about 20%.
Given that Americans sleep an average of eight-and-a-half hours per night, the results could be promising in changing people’s behavior. Hu also mentioned that it could be used to help people reduce bad habits, such as smoking or unhealthy eating.
Although Hu and the study’s authors admit that more information is needed, the method could be used to help change implicit biases.
Two other psychologists, Gordon Feld and Jan Born, wrote in a commentary on the paper that the study has the potential to “permanently modify any unwanted behaviour by targeted memory reactivation during sleep.”
In other words, it may work because when people sleep, their brains access short-term memories and transfer them to the parts of the brain that remember things for longer periods of time. The distinctive sound may help trigger the memory from the study and help to enhance that learning process.
