New research reveals how a city's structure influences residents' unconscious racial bias, finding that cities that are denser, more diverse, and less segregated have lower levels of such bias. is low. The findings suggest that urban institutions play an important role in systemic racism and provide insights for building more just cities. Credit: SciTechDaily.com
Urban density, diversity, and levels of segregation are important factors that influence racial bias in cities, and less segregated and more diverse environments can help reduce unconscious bias.
The city you live in may be making you, your family, and friends unconsciously racist. Or maybe your city won't make you racist anymore. It depends on how populous, diverse, and segregated your city is, according to a new study that combines urban mathematics with the psychology of how individuals form unconscious racial bias. It depends on what you are doing.
This study was published in the current issue. nature communicationspresents data and mathematical models about exposure and adaptation in social networks that help explain why some cities have more unconscious or implicit racial bias than others. I am. The authors hope that communities and governments can use the findings to build fairer and more equitable cities.
Understanding unconscious bias in cities
“What I find most interesting is that it suggests that there is some systemic racism that has to do with how people learn and how cities are organized,” said SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellow said psychologist Andrew Stier, lead author of the study.
Cities form dense networks of social interactions between people. Because we interact with many different people, we constantly need to adapt and learn to new situations, explains Louis Bettencourt, an external professor at SFI (University of Chicago), co-leader of SFI's Cities, Scalability and Sustainability Project, and co-author of this study.
“Ambiguity in All Directions” by Jean-Gerrit Schuurman, acrylic on canvas, 2018, is part of an art installation on display at the Santa Fe Institute. Credit: © JG Schurman
To see how racial bias manifests itself in how American cities are organized, Steer turned to a huge database of Implicit Association Tests (IATs). In the popular online test, volunteer participants are presented with a combination of a white or black face and a positive or negative word and are asked to classify each face or word. If you are faster to classify things when white/good is paired, then you have a white-good bias, and if you are faster to classify things when black/good is paired, then There is a black-good bias.
“People may feel they are not biased, but they may unconsciously prefer certain groups, and these tests reveal that,” Steer says. .
Researchers obtained average IAT bias scores from approximately 2.7 million individuals in various geographic regions and correlated them with racial demographics and U.S. Census population data to determine whether individuals are biased through their social networks. We built a model to explain how we learn. They found that when these networks were larger, more diverse, and less segregated within cities, implicit racial bias decreased.
Structural factors and racism
This result suggests that there are structural reasons why cities can help or prevent people from becoming less racially biased. Perhaps the most obvious reason is that different racial groups are segregated into different regions. Related to this is the lack of more cosmopolitan public spaces where diverse people can experience positive interactions with each other.
Racial bias is a major barrier to equity in cities where other groups cannot meet and interact with the people and institutions they use. These barriers, the authors explain, are associated with disparities across essentially every aspect of life, including health care, education, employment, policing, mental health outcomes, and physical health.
References: Andrew J. Stier, Sheena Sajjadi, Fariba Karimi, Louis M.A. Bettencourt, Mark G. Berman. have lower racial prejudice,” February 6, 2024, nature communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45013-8
