there was significant activation in the nucleus accumbens. They felt an immediate honey hit, joy ove

there was significant activation in the nucleus accumbens. They felt an immediate honey hit, joy over the rival’s pain. The higher the activation in this reward area, the more likely they were to choose the option of watching the rival experience pain — like watching a public execution and cheering for just deserts. These results show that individual differences in our compassion toward others in pain predicts our willingness to help them. It reveals another dimension, like language, that biases our sense of justice, both in our judgments and in our behavior. Conversely, individual differences in our joy over others’ misery predicts our willingness to allow others to suffer, suppress our instincts to help and, I suggest, facilitate our capacity to harm. Similar response patterns arise in the context of race —a feature of group membership that is fixed at birth. As noted earlier, babies stare longer at faces of people from the same race than from people ofa different race, and by the pre-school years, are more likely to show social preferences for peers and adults of the same race. In brain imaging studies, specific areas activate when we process faces as opposed to other objects, and one tenth of a second later, other associated regions activate when we process race. This rapid activation occurs whether we are consciously engaged in classifying faces by race or not; for example, the same areas activate even when we are forced to focus on gender or familiarity. This shows that from the brain’s perspective, we don’t have an option of processing a person’s race. The brain automatically and unconsciously hands us this information, like it or not. The fact that we process race automatically gains importance based on a powerful set of behavioral studies showing that virtually every person, independently of their explicit avowals of non- racist attitudes, holds implicit or unconscious racist biases. Using a research tool developed by the social psychologists Tony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji called the Implicit Attitudes Test or IAT, subjects see different faces or read different descriptions of people, and then make evaluative judgments about these people. Often, the presentations are rapid so that there is little or no time to reflect upon the evaluation. For example, in a study focused on race, subjects first classified photographs of people’s faces as either Caucasian or Black. Next they classified words into those associated with good positive meaning — joy and friend — and those with bad negative meaning — hate and bomb. In the third and critical step, subjects saw faces and words together and, using a rule provided by the experimenter, struck one of two keys on a keyboard as fast as possible: for example, strike the #1 key if you see a Black face and a good word, but the #2 key if you see a Caucasian face and a good word. The intuition here is that if certain faces and words are more strongly associated, because this is what people have learned over time, then they will press the relevant key faster than for weaker associations. Results from several studies confirm this intuition. For example, Caucasian subjects who explicitly deny racist attitudes are nonetheless slower to respond when Black, as opposed to Caucasian faces are associated with good words, and faster to respond when Black, as opposed to Caucasian faces are associated with bad words. These patterns hold Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 98 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012844