The Washington Post reported on a new study published Thursday in the magazine Science.
In it, a research team used a bias-diminishing exercise followed by a 90-minute nap to cut down on what is called implicit bias. Simply put, these are biases one feels — usually associated with racism and sexism — formed involuntarily and subconsciously. These form at a very early age as a result of the environment one is raised in.
The idea for the study came to Xiaoqing Hu, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas and Austin, when he happened upon sleep studies showing how a good night’s sleep can improve memory.
This aligned with his goal of trying to find ways to cut down on implicit bias. To start, the team had black people and women take a frequently used test to determine how closely words and phrases are subconsciously linked with groups of people.
Then, Hu and his team gathered 40 male and female college students and asked them to pair faces and words in ways that went against common stereotypes — for example, pairing science or math words with a female face. When a subject made a bias-breaking combination, he or she heard a tone, which was different depending on whether the association was anti-sexist or anti-racist.
Following the exercise, subjects took a 90-minute nap, and while they were asleep, the team played one of the two tones for some of them, while the others were undisturbed. The tone helped boost the memory of the exercise while the person slept, essentially repeating the broken bias.
After waking up, those exposed to the tone while sleeping showed an astounding 50 percent reduction is baseline bias. After a week, those who heard the tones still showed a 20 percent bias reduction, while those who hadn’t heard the tones went back to regular bias levels.
As Hu told the Washington boost, the dropped bias levels may have occurred because the “weak memory” moved from the hippocampus in the brain to the neocortex — associated with longer memory — when “called up” by the tone. Hu also said he wasn’t surprised on the change after a week, calling the exercise a “single shot.”
Hu hopes to find a way to increase the bias-breaking effect, perhaps with a full night’s sleep as opposed to a 90-minute nap. The study indicated this could happen, since those who got into deeper (high-quality) sleeps had lower bias levels after the exercise.
If this form of bias-reduction takes off, it could expand to other uses including curing overeating or a smoking addiction.
