Readers React: Battling racial bias with better education

To the editor: Stanford psychology professor Jennifer Eberhardt’s stunning findings on the effects that social biases regarding skin color have on basic perceptual processes is a marvelous example of creative thought and the importance of the behavioral sciences for society. (“Stanford’s Jennifer Eberhardt wins MacArthur ‘genius’ grant,” Sept. 16)

Recent findings in neuroscience provide an underlying explanation of her discoveries.

Traditional thought assumed that our experiences involve two stages of brain processing: The sensory systems first perform objective analysis of environmental stimuli and then pass on the results to “higher” regions of the cerebral cortex for interpretation. The belief in “pure objective sensory analysis” is now known to be wrong.

There is no purely objective perceptual system in the brain. Rather, our basic sensory systems themselves actually give psychological meaning to sensory stimuli based on prior associations. That may explain why an association between crime and blacks enabled white subjects to perceive guns better in the presence of black faces.

The good news is that associations can be changed or reversed. So education, by building new associations, is the remedy, and our brains will give perceptual advantages to them.

Norman Weinberger, Irvine

The writer, a research professor at UC Irvine, is a fellow at the university’s Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

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To the editor: What a valuable and humbling article on Eberhardt and her research.

Even the slightest conscience dictates that all of us raise our consciousness to the unintended biases we harbor. No other response would be just.

Eileen Bigelow, Whittier

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