This is an ABC podcast.

Hi, Lynne Malcolm here with a podcast

in this conversation we explore brain bias and prejudice.

The global Black Lives Matter movement has recently highlighted the extent of prejudice and racial bias across the world's societies.

So what happens in our brains when we make assumptions about people who don't seem to be like us,

when they may look, speak or behave differently?

Does society condition us to have less feeling or empathy for people we don't consider to be part of our group?

And could brain science help us to override our prejudices?

To explore some of these questions, I'm speaking with Lassana Harris,

whose Associate Professor in Experimental Psychology at University College London.

His research is in social neuroscience, specifically looking at how we perceive

other people, as well as animals and other things outside ourselves. He explained to me how he

became interested in this area. Completely by accident, initially I was interested in emotions

and how people felt when they encountered other people.

And that led me to investigating what we call social cognition, so the idea of getting inside somebody's head.

So when we encounter other people, presumably one of the things that we always do is we think about their minds,

we try to get inside of their head to know something about their thoughts, feelings, personality,

and the like.

And so I study emotions that led me to really study this very interesting cognitive process.

Now most of my work focuses on that cognitive process, specifically what I call

boundary conditions of it, so cases where we encounter other people but fail to think about

their minds and cases where we encounter things that aren't people but attribute minds to them.

...