The city you live in may be making you, your family, and your friends unconsciously more racist. Or maybe your city makes you less racist. A new study combines urban mathematics with the psychology of how individuals develop unconscious racial biases, noting that it depends on the size, diversity and degree of racial segregation in your city.
The study, published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Communications, provides data and mathematical models of exposure and adaptation in social networks that help explain why some cities have more unconscious or implicit racial bias than others. The authors hope local communities and governments can use these findings to help create more just and equitable cities.
"I think the most interesting thing about this is that it means that part of systemic racism has to do with the way people learn and the way cities are organized," said psychologist Andrew Stier, an SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow and first author of the study.
Cities create dense networks of social interactions between people. SFI External Professor Luís Bettencourt (University of Chicago) is co-director of SFI's "Cities, Scale and Sustainability" project and co-author of the study.
To understand how racial bias emerges from the way American cities are organized, Steele turned to the vast database of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In this popular online test, volunteers are asked to pair white or black faces with positive or negative words and to classify individual faces or words. If they categorize things faster when paired with White/Good, they have a White-Good bias; if they categorize things faster when paired with Black/Good, they have a Black-Good bias.
"People may feel they are not biased, but they may unconsciously favor one group over another, and these tests can reveal that," Steele said.
The researchers took average IAT bias scores from about 2.7 million people in different geographic areas and linked them to racial demographics and population data from the U.S. Census to build a model of how individuals learn bias through social networks. They found that implicit racial bias decreased when these networks were larger, more diverse, and less segregated in cities.
The findings suggest there are structural reasons why cities help or hinder people from reducing racial prejudice. The most obvious reason may be that different racial groups are segregated into different neighborhoods. Relatedly, cities lack more public spaces where people of different races can interact positively.
In cities where people are unable to access and interact with the people and institutions used by other groups, racial bias creates a major barrier to equity. The authors explain that these barriers are related to disparities in essentially every aspect of life, including health care, education, employment, policing, mental health outcomes, and physical health.
Compiled source: ScitechDaily