What if we’re being influenced by hidden thoughts and feelings we’re not even aware of? What if our decisions are made by feelings buried deep within the complex networks of our brain? What if it is these, not the dispassionate facts which are really driving our decisions in life? 

In fact, our behaviour is more likely to be influenced by how our brains are wired than any complex thinking about the facts at hand. In a society raised on the free-will notion that we can become anything we want if we set our minds to it and want it enough (just look at the X-factor contestants), the idea that some key aspects of the way we behave are largely outside of our control could be something of a shock. One case in point is prejudice. We all have an egalitarian belief in ourselves that we are fair, just and tolerant, but growing scientific evidence is revealing that we may have much less control over how we behave when it comes to being prejudiced against other people than we might want to believe.

Psychologists have always seen the processes of prejudice as being based in the way we have to categorise people quickly in an attempt to make our complex world more manageable. Reducing people to groups about whom we have make simpler prejudgments about their likely behaviour makes life a lot easier to cope with. But now the technology of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanner, Event-Related Potential (ERP) instruments and the electroencephalogram (EEG) are revealing just how ‘hard-wired’ our prejudice may be.

These new neuroimaging techniques are helping us understand how billions of neurons (10 to the power of 11 for the mathematicians among us) and a 100,000 kilometers of neural connections cooperate to perceive, represent and act on the world. With these advances in technology to explore the physical neural processes underpinning behaviour we finally have a window on those processes and this arena has taken on a whole new impetus.

These developments make it possible to 'see' the brain in action, to watch it engaging in the cognitions and emotions that are such an essential part of our mental life. These methods have afforded insight to illness and injury, but also to the instinctive human reactions induced by our contact with other groups, reactions which drive our prejudices and our behaviours.

The instinctive and prejudiced response is thought to be instigated in the brain’s amygdale (the ‘fight or flight’ part of the brain), located bilaterally in the medial temporal lobe.  Initial work showed that these structures were related to our conditioned fear response and are activated at great speed. MRI studies of our facial processing reveal that increased and greater activity in the amygdale is induced by the faces of people who are unlike us (so called out-groups). These instinctive responses are correlated with the strength of people’s negative evaluations of other racial groups. 

One study very briefly exposed people to photographs of the faces of other racial groups for just 33 milliseconds and then covered the photograph with a neutral image. This is far too fast for the eyes to even recognise the image as a face. MRI scans showed that the amygdale were activated, despite the fact that the subjects could not report seeing anything other than the neutral image as the visual response and recognition typically takes almost 400 milliseconds. These processes seem targeted whether or not our attention is directed to that feature. 

For example, researchers have found that the amygdale rapidly respond to ‘untrustworthy’ faces even when their attention is directed towards another aspects of the face (e.g. age) and even negative names are enough to activate the amygdale. These vigilance functions of the amygdale have led researchers to focus on them in terms of our response to other groups and, in particular, other racial groups. Although it is still unclear as to what amygdale activation reflects, what is clear is that activation does not require conscious recognition of the stimulus: activation takes place at an unconscious level between 4 and 10 times faster than our conscious processes. 

The amygdale and areas of the right inferior Pre-Frontal Cortex (PFC) are implicated in both our conscious and unconscious responses with the medial PFC being involved in more conscious evaluative processing which may underpin more ambivalent attitudes where both positive and negative amygdale activations are involved. Recent work has shown that we as humans are unique in that our amydale seem to have different functions; one which learns prejudice from experience (which is the case with other animals) and the other uniquely which learns from being instructed by others.

Emerging evidence from neuroscience shows that the amygdale and the medial prefrontal cortex both have a function in asocial stereotyping. What is clear is that our unconscious biases are dressed and driving behaviour long before our prejudice control mechanisms have their conscious metaphorical trousers on.

It seems then that prejudice is ‘hard-wired’, in terms of the way we categorise, identify and compare people and groups, but also in the way our brain reacts to other groups who are unlike us. Gordon Allport called it ‘the normality of prejudice’. But where does that leave us as individual and as HR professionals if prejudice is apparently inevitable? All is not lost. It seems that we also have ‘hard-wiring’ to prevent our instinctive reactions becoming behaviour. 

It seems that our instinctive responses initiated by the amygdale are mediated by spindle neurons in the brain’s anterior cingulated cortex (ACC); a fibrous mass within the brain through which messages transit to the other side of the brain. This is the area of the brain responsible for automatic processes such as blood pressure and also empathy and emotion. Again, humans are unique within the animal kingdom in the number and size of spindle neurons which to date have only been found in higher order social animals like the whales and great apes.

The spindle cells (or neurons), located in the anterior cingulated cortex and frontoinsular cortex, refract the waves of instinctive ‘threat’ responses so that reactions to people who are dissimilar are considered and processed rather than creating an emotional and unprocessed response. 

Scientists have noticed that when we are trying to control our prejudice the ACC creates a wave of signals (known as error related negativity or ERN) when conflict between our egalitarian self concept and intended behaviour exists. This activates a regulatory function in the ACC which overrides the amydale and mPFC.

In the real world, it seems that all but the most prejudiced among us recognise the conflict automatically and unconsciously, but that many of us don’t also have the well developed and automatic regulator which cuts in to prevent the behaviour unconsciously.

In particular, the amount of cognitive processing power required to maintain the regulatory function, which is shared with many other mental processes, is such that when other processes use up that capacity it can fail. For example when we are stressed, emotional or given ambiguous tasks or the regulatory function is undermined by using alcohol our instincts are more likely to become behaviour. 

Some are now suggesting, just like a muscle which has memory for certain well rehearsed actions, that we can build strong and automatic regulatory capacity by raising our awareness of our prejudices, with practice and with effort. 

If we consciously try to control our prejudices eventually the regulatory function will need less and less of the cognitive resources and pass to become unconscious and automatic. If we can identify our prejudices, we can as Binna Kandola suggests in his recent book act as: “…critics, editors and managers of the stream of impressions, associations and ideas generated by our senses and our first line recognition and categorisation machinery”. 

The Challenge is to be self aware of our prejudices and willing to try to practice control techniques as the first step to change.