OUR brains have a subtle but deeply ingrained tendency to fear “outsiders”, such as people of a different race. While this bias may partly explain racism, it seems that it can be overcome by social interaction.
In much the same way that Pavlov taught dogs to salivate at the ringing of a bell, Elizabeth Phelps of New York University and her colleagues taught 73 students to fear a particular face by pairing a photo of that face with a small electric shock. They used measures of skin conductance that indicate how much a person is sweating as a proxy for…
