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Study Looks at Race Dialogue: Dartmouth Work Finds Talk With Blacks Drains Some Whites (Sonia Scherr, 11/17/03, Valley News)

Interacting with someone of a different race affected some students' ability to do well on a mental test, a Dartmouth College study found.

White students with greater “racial bias,” however unintentional, did worse on a cognitive test after discussing a controversial campus issue with a black male student, according to the study, which was published yesterday in the online edition of Nature Neuroscience. In addition, after being shown photographs of black males, those students had greater neural activity in an area in the front of the brain that has been linked to control of thoughts and behaviors.

The results suggest that the students were trying to avoid appearing prejudiced when interacting with the black students, said Jennifer Richeson, the study's lead author and an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth. That effort may deplete their mental resources and impair their ability to complete cognitive tasks, just as exercise tires a muscle and makes it more difficult to perform physically in the short-term, she said.

Richeson, along with five other Dartmouth researchers and one from Princeton, measured racial bias in 30 white Dartmouth students using a computer test to record the ease with which the individuals associated white Americans and black Americans with positive and negative concepts. They then had students discuss the college's fraternity-sorority system or racial profiling after September 11 with a black student whom they didn't know was part of the study. [...]

Eric Liu, a senior government major, said the results of the study make sense. “I think, especially with college students, they want to portray themselves as more cosmopolitan (and) openly liberal -- and a lot of times that's a facade,” said Liu, who's from Youngstown, Ohio.

Discomfort while interacting with a fellow student who's of a different race could have far-reaching implications, said Liu, who's Asian-American and a former editor of the on-campus quarterly journal Main Street, which focuses on Asian Americans and cross-cultural diversity issues.

“Any interactions that occur at this level are bound to have an effect when we get out into society and into the real world,” he said. For instance, the Dartmouth study might help explain why there are fewer minorities or women at higher levels in the workplace, since those groups might have trouble breaking into a predominantly white environment, he said.

Robert Baca, a senior English major from Los Angeles, said he sometimes encounters an “exhausting frustration” when students discuss their feeling about racial prejudice that doesn't occur during conversations about everyday matters.

“You're trying to overcome such and such a bias or you're trying to understand, and that goes for both” minorities and nonminorities, said Baca, who's Mexican-American.

But if white students were working hard to avoid responding inappropriately around black students, as the study showed, that could be viewed as a positive sign, he said. “They're suppressing for a reason, and hopefully that bodes well or speaks well for change, that there's at least awareness.”

Liu and Baca both said the study, when looked at in reverse, could illuminate the feelings minority students experience interacting with their white peers. “How exhausting is that?” Baca asked. “Because it would be a constant thing as opposed to an occasional interaction.”

Hard to imagine anything less worthwhile than asking college students their personal reactions to such a limited study. For instance, note that the students assume racial animus will be reduced by greater interaction, that such obvious attempts to seem tolerant would lead to fewer minorities in the work place, and seemingly that the experience of minorities will reflect a feeling of being seen as inferior, rather than a feeling of racial bias on their own part. All three assumptions seem dubious and none appear to be supported by the study, such as it is.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 17, 2003 6:43 PM