Jennifer Richeson has a sweet tooth. She likes jelly beans—especially green jelly beans. "I could eat them ad nauseam—and I do," she tells her students in the "Stereotyping and Prejudice" course she teaches at Northwestern University. If she were to pick only one jelly bean from a pack, it would probably be green. But if she were to scoop up a handful, she wouldn't put the other colors back. "Because it's rude, and because it just doesn't seem right. It's called a variety pack for a reason."
Taking jelly beans one at a time, you can easily fail to realize that you favor a single color. See all your green selections at once, though, and it's obvious. The anecdote relates to what she tells her students: if you want to understand prejudice, don't look only at conscious thoughts and spoken words. Look at what people feel and do without realizing it.
That's where the action is in today's research on discrimination, and Richeson, 35, is at its forefront. A social psychologist, she peers into the unconscious world of race relations, using computers to measure microsecond differences in reaction times, for example, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at how the brain reacts to interracial encounters. The methods allow her to examine the "they aren't like us" feeling—which can be about gender, age, religion, language, sexual orientation or even obesity. Richeson works on race relations, she says, because "race is particularly marked" for Americans—that is, we pay a lot of attention to it. But her true subject is not a particular kind of identity, but identity in general.
Richeson's tests indicate that everyone has measurable, often unconscious, preferences for some social groups over others. For example, a computer-based procedure called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, measures the fraction-of-a-second differences in how quickly people associate stereotypically "white" names (such as "Chip") with positive words like "heaven" versus how quickly they associate "black" names (such as "Jamaal") with the same words. Most white Americans, despite their conscious beliefs, are measurably faster to pair the white names with the positive words—and that holds true even for some African-Americans.
In other words, prejudice is not a trait, like baldness or brown eyes, that some have and some don't. Rather, it is a state of mind to which nobody is immune. Forty years ago social psychologists tried to figure out what made prejudiced people tick. Nowadays, Richeson says, they try to understand prejudice itself, which is a part of what makes all of us tick.
Aside from not recognizing our own prejudice, we often aren't aware of the extra work we do to cope with it. For example, Richeson and her collaborators recently used an fMRI scanner to capture images of brain activity in white student volunteers as they looked at photographs of black men. Two brain regions were unusually active: the right prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex, both of which are known to be hard at work when people have to evaluate and shape their own behavior—a process some psychologists call "executive function" and the rest of us might call "self-control."
The brain scans help explain why whites did less well on a puzzle (sorting words flashed on a computer screen) after a brief encounter with a black interviewer than whites who had a similar encounter with a white interviewer. Richeson and a colleague, J. Nicole Shelton, found that the more strongly biased the white volunteer appeared—according to the Implicit Association Test—the worse he or she did on the puzzle after being interviewed by a black person. (In a later study, the same held true for black students who interacted with white interviewers.)
The reason, Richeson posits, is the laudable desire not to look like a bigot. Faced with someone of another race, the heavily biased person devotes more mental effort to self-control—to behaving in an unbiased way. That effort, unconscious though it may be, leaves the white volunteer with less mental capacity for the test.
