All humans belong to only one species in which there are also no biological “races”. Accordingly, we are all equally human, regardless of our ethnic group. Although most people agree with this statement, a study using implicit association tests shows that white people are more likely to associate the word “human” with their own ethnic group than with other ethnic groups. Non-white subjects, on the other hand, did not show the tendency to perceive their own ethnicity as the “most human”.
Biologically, there are no different “races” of humans, and all humans alive today belong to a single species: Homo sapiens. Genetic analyzes show that the variation between members of the same ethnic group is greater than the variation between different ethnic groups. Nevertheless, people in history have repeatedly emphasized differences between alleged “races”, people from certain ethnic groups have denied being human and thus, among other things, justified colonialist power structures. To this day, many people suffer from racial prejudice, for example in the education system, in professional life and in the context of police violence.
Implicit associations tested
Although today hardly anyone would claim that people of certain ethnic groups, skin colors or religious communities are less human than others, implicit prejudices are widespread. This is suggested by a study that recorded the unconscious associations with race and humanity in over 61,000 people from different ethnic backgrounds. The research team led by Kirsten Morehouse from Harvard University in Cambridge used so-called implicit association tests. The idea behind it: If information fits our associations, we can react to it more quickly.
In the tests used for the study, Morehouse and her team presented the subjects with human faces and various words that the subjects were asked to assign to categories by pressing a button. For example, they should indicate whether the photos are of African or European Americans and whether a term – such as “person” or “hamster” – belongs to the category human or animal. The key assignment changed so that sometimes “white” and “human” as well as “black” and “animal” were on the same button, sometimes the other way around. Depending on which key assignment a test person typed in the correct solution faster, the researchers concluded that they associated blacks or whites more with the concept of “human”. In various experiments, the researchers varied the faces to include other ethnic groups.
All people are equal, but some are more equal?
The result: “Although almost all test subjects expressly affirmed that all ethnic groups are equally human, white participants in the implicit association tests consistently associated the word ‘human’ with white rather than with black, Hispanic and Asian groups,” reports the research team. It did not matter whether the subjects were white Americans or whites from other regions of the world. The effect was slightly more pronounced for people who self-identified as conservative than for people who self-identified as liberal, and slightly more pronounced for men than women. Age, religion and education, on the other hand, had no significant effect. “Non-white participants showed no bias towards ‘human = own group,'” write Morehouse and her team. “In contrast, when the test included two groups that did not match their own, such as when subjects of Asian descent took the test Black/White – Human/Animal, non-white participants also showed a ‘human = white’ association.”
To find out whether the results came about because white people associated their own race particularly strongly with the concept of human, or because they associated other races with the concept of animal, the team did not just run the same tests Conceived from the animal kingdom, but also with numerous other categories, including neutral ones like clothing and furniture, positive ones like gods, flowers and desserts, and negative ones like poisons and catastrophes. “The effect persisted even when the human concept was contrasted with other attributes,” the researchers explain. “So what was decisive was the distinction between human and non-human, not between human and animal. Taken together, these works suggest that contemporary people who belong to a socially dominant group are not exempt from the belief that their group is more human than others.”
Real impact unclear
To what extent unconscious biases measured with implicit association tests have real-world effects is unclear. Regarding explicit beliefs, studies suggest that people who deny others their humanity tend to be less altruistic and more violent. “However, whether implicit human-animal stereotypes predict similar or different behavioral outcomes has not yet been sufficiently clarified,” the research team said. Previous studies had already indicated that the results from implicit association tests give little information about real behaviors.
Source: Kirsten Morehouse (Harvard University, Cambridge, USA) et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, doi: 10.1073/pnas.2300995120