Giving White People The Illusion Of Darker Skin Makes Them Less Racist
Illusions And Biases Dreamstime A change of skin tone can bring a change of heart, apparently. An optical illusion can change the implicit biases of Caucasian people against people with darker skin, according to a study published in the August 2013 edition of Cognition. The research, a collaboration between Royal Holloway University of London, the Central European University in Budapest and Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands, analyzed the implicit racial biases of 34 Caucasian participants, then subjected them to something called the Rubber Hand Illusion, where they watched a rubber hand being touched by a paintbrush as they felt their own hand being stimulated out of sight. The illusion creates the sense that the fake hand is part of the subject's body, even when it's of a completely different skin color. The more the participants felt like the darker skinned fake hand was their own, the less racist they...