What if you
could, for a moment, have the body of someone of a different race, age, or sex?
Would that change the way you feel about yourself or the way that you
stereotype different social groups? Researchers explain how they have used the
brain's ability to bring together information from different senses to make white
people feel that they were inhabiting black bodies and adults feel like they
had children's bodies. The results of such virtual body-swapping experiments
are remarkable and have important implications for approaching phenomena such
as race and gender discrimination. Negative attitudes about others are often
formed at a young age, and they're thought to remain relatively stable
throughout adulthood.
However, few
studies have examined whether implicit social biases can change. In recent
years, researcher of the Royal Holloway University of London, University
College London and the University of Barcelona have developed ways to expose
participants to bodily illusions that induce ownership over a body different
from their own with respect to race, age, or gender. For white people who were
made to feel that they had black bodies, their unconscious biases against black
people diminished. And adults who felt as if they had children's bodies
processed perceptual information and aspects of themselves as being more
childlike. Research shows that integration of different sensory signals can
allow the brain to update its model of the body and cause people to change
their attitudes about others.
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