Imaging study finds overcoming bias is hard work for the brain
Actively resisting bias is hard work for the brain, researchers reported in the April issue of Scientific Reports, even when it comes to something as simple and ordinary as musical preferences.
Framing bias, or the idea that people react to certain situations differently based on how those situations are presented, is not only a common phenomenon, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis and colleagues wrote in their report—it’s an expected one. Societally ingrained practices and expectations make it hard to deliberately overcome prejudiced thinking.
“Although the cognitive processes underlying framing bias have received increasing attention in recent years, there is surprisingly scarce evidence regarding the neural mechanisms that underlie decision-makers’ ability to reduce the influence of contextual information to form a less biased decision,” Margulis and her co-authors wrote.
Margulis’ team recruited 20 participants for their trial, which was based at the University of Connecticut and aimed to record people’s cognitive responses to different musical pieces through fMRI imaging. Each participant listened to eight pairs of 70-second clips of two musicians playing a piano piece—one who was identified as a student and the other who was named a “world-renowned professional pianist.”
“Musical stimuli provide participants with ample opportunity to gather information about objective stimulus quality, since the presented musical excerpts provide a constant and relatively long stream of new information compared to other sensory stimuli,” the authors wrote. “The long duration should allow participants to gather enough information to form an objective judgement rather than a context-dependent one.”
The researchers flipped the tapes’ labels so study subjects were under the impression that the student was playing at a world-renowned level while the professional was performing at a student level, and each participants flagged which performance they enjoyed more.
The team found that when a participant most enjoyed the piece attributed to the professional pianist, that participant’s primary auditory complex lit up, as well as the brain’s pleasure and reward regions. Activity in those areas began only after a subject was told the musician was professional, suggesting knowing that fact made people tune in more to the recordings.
When participants preferred the “student” recording, they realized they might have been fooled, the authors said. In those cases, subjects’ fMRIs showed increased connectivity between the brain’s cognitive control and reward centers and hiked activity in regions devoted to executive control, leading Margulis et al. to believe the brain was working harder in cases where subjects suppressed bias.
“Our study provides new insight into the neural circuitry underlying a phenomenon that has long been articulated by philosophers and demonstrated in behavioral studies,” the co-authors said. “Accordingly, our findings are relevant for behavioral economists, psychologists and artists alike, as they demonstrate that ‘deliberative and effortful thinking’ can play a crucial role in overcoming cognitive heuristics related to socially constructed concepts and stereotypes.”
After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington with a bachelor’s in journalism, Anicka joined TriMed’s Chicago team in 2017 covering cardiology. Close to her heart is long-form journalism, Pilot G-2 pens, dark chocolate and her dog Harper Lee.