Humans

Psychologists have shown that reflexive biases influence our perceptions of others, potentially explaining the persistence of various forms of prejudice. But reliably measuring our implicit biases is trickier than it first appeared

Humans 26 August 2020
By Pragya Agarwal

Timo Kuilder

YOU are biased. So am I. We all discriminate. It is both a source of concern and comfort that we don’t necessarily do so deliberately and that our prejudices aren’t always wilful.
If societies are to truly confront the pernicious effects of racism and prejudice, the importance of examining these biases and how they become etched into the brain is becoming increasingly clear. The death of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer in Minneapolis on 25 May shook the world to attention, but it was no isolated incident. Every day there are stories of people being treated with suspicion – or far worse – based on their skin colour while going about their daily lives.
This is in spite of the fact that, for the past 40 years, opinion polls show a steady decline in racist views in the US, UK and other countries. That has led some researchers to suspect that, as explicit racism has been driven underground, unconscious bias is playing a critical role. This suspicion inspired the creation of the Implicit Association Test, a tool that aims to reveal unconscious biases with a few clicks of the mouse.
Unfortunately, the accuracy and reliability of this widely celebrated test isn’t what it once seemed. Pinning down the nature and extent of hidden bias is proving to be extraordinarily complicated. Eradicating it is far from straightforward, too – and it turns out that some efforts to do so may further entrench the very prejudices they are meant to uproot. But we are making progress, not least in understanding the processes in our brains that perpetuate … More

We are more aware of how “unconscious” biases work than ever before, says neuroscientist Lasana Harris – and we can use our conscious brains to override them

Humans 26 August 2020
By Lasana Harris

Stephanie Singleton

WHY are we prejudiced? What happens in our brains when we make assumptions about people who look or speak differently to us? As movements such as Black Lives Matter work to expose the systemic racism in the US and Europe, such questions are taking on new and long overdue urgency. If we are to overcome our biases, we need to understand their neural and psychological roots.
Lasana Harris, a neuroscientist and experimental psychologist at University College London, is among those striving for such an understanding. His research focuses on how we think about other people’s minds, known as social cognition, and more specifically on how we perceive others. Working with Susan Fiske at Princeton University, his research on the brain mechanisms underlying dehumanisation has revealed the surprising ease with which we can stop ourselves from having empathy for the plights of others.
Such insights have informed his thinking on racism, too. Harris views what many people call unconscious bias as an inevitable result of the associations we learn and the way our brains react to perceived threats. Rather than something we engage in unconsciously, he argues that it is something we know we are doing but struggle to control.
Here he tells New Scientist why societies condition people to be prejudiced and what the science says we can do about it.
Daniel Cossins: Dehumanisation is a horrifying word and yet your work suggests it is something we all do. Why is that?
Lasana Harris: Firstly, if I want to do something to another human being that is something I don’t typically like doing to human beings, then I’m … More

By Colin Barras
This ancient burial style is difficult to understand
A.M. Herrero-Corral, et al.

AN UNUSUAL 3700-year-old grave unearthed in Spain shows how little we know about some ancient burial practices.
At the Humanejos site, 20 kilometres south of Madrid, there are about 100 ancient tombs. None is quite as strange as grave 31.
Inside the 1.2-metre-deep grave, the body of a 15-year-old youth was placed, sitting upright. He was then partially buried, leaving his head and shoulders exposed to the elements. Eventually, the body decayed and the youth’s upper body collapsed – at which point more dirt was added to the … More

By Douglas Heingartner
In the DESIGMA-Advanced test, a respondent must work out which shape logically comes next in several series like the ones shown here
Benedikt Schneider

People who are given instructions on how to succeed at a widely used type of IQ test end up with far higher scores than those who take the test without learning these tips beforehand – throwing into question the validity of these kinds of tests and contributing to critiques of IQ tests in general.
That’s the main finding of a study that looked at “progressive matrices”, a kind of IQ test that displays a series of changing … More

The systems of science are perpetuating bias, hype, negligence and fraud – and this means far too many findings are worthless, says psychologist Stuart Ritchie

Humans 19 August 2020
By Graham Lawton

Rocio Montoya

WHEN Stuart Ritchie was a graduate student in Edinburgh, UK, in 2011, he was involved in an incident that shook his faith in science. With two colleagues, he tried and failed to replicate a famous experiment on precognition, the ability to see the future. They sent their results to the journal that published the original research and received an immediate rejection on the grounds that the journal didn’t accept studies that repeated previous experiments.
Ritchie remained a scientist – he is a psychologist at King’s College London with a focus on studying human intelligence – but ever since that rejection, he has been on a crusade to air science’s dirty laundry. His latest book is Science Fictions, in which he shows how, all too often, we can’t rely on the facts that science provides.
Graham Lawton: The grand and scary claim of your book is that something is rotten in the kingdom of science.
Stuart Ritchie: Absolutely. We think of science as being this objective thing that tells us facts about the world and produces all these scientific papers, which are almost sacred things. But a lot of people don’t see how the sausage is made. I think if they had more of an idea of how the process happens, they would question the truth status of those papers much more. In a lot of cases, the science is useless, not worth the paper it is written on.
You identify four main causes of rot.
First there’s fraud, when people deliberately alter or make up results to try to get a paper published. That’s rare, but not as rare … More

Kindred by Rebecca Wragg Sykes explains how modern techniques are helping us to better understand Neanderthals, as well as where we fit in to the family tree

Humans 19 August 2020
By Simon Ings
Neanderthal art in Spain, painted between 43,000 and 65,000 years ago
Jorge Guerrero/AFP via Getty Images

Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art
Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Bloomsbury Sigma

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HOW we began to unpick our species’ ancient past in the late 19th century is an astounding story, but not always a pretty one. As well as attaining tremendous insights into the age of Earth and how life evolved, scholars also entertained astonishingly bad ideas about superiority.
Some of these continue today. Why do we assume that Neanderthals, who flourished for 400,000 years, were somehow inferior to Homo sapiens or less fit to survive?
In Kindred, a history of our understanding of Neanderthals, Rebecca Wragg Sykes separates perfectly valid and reasonable questions – for example, “why aren’t Neanderthals around any more?” – from the thinking that casts our ancient relatives as “dullard losers on a withered branch of the family tree”.
As an archaeologist with a special interest in the cognitive aspects of stone tool technologies, Wragg Sykes paints a fascinating picture of a field transformed almost beyond recognition over the past 30 years.
Artefacts at well-preserved sites are no longer merely dug and brushed: they are scanned. High-powered optical microscopes pick out slice and chop marks, electron beams trace the cross-sections of scratches at the nano-scale and rapid collagen identification techniques can determine an animal from even tiny bone fragments.
The risk with any new tool is that, in our excitement, we over-interpret the results it throws up. For example, while Neanderthals may have performed some funerary activity, they may not have thrown flowers on their loved ones’ graves as we once thought.
Other stories continue to accumulate a weight of circumstantial evidence. We have known for a few years that some Neanderthals tanned leather; now it seems they may also have spun thread.
“The significance of Neanderthal art may simply be that Neanderthals had fun making it”

An exciting aspect of this book is the way it refreshes our ideas about our own place in hominin evolution.
Rather than congratulating other species when they behave like us, Wragg Sykes shows that it is much more fruitful to see how human talents are related to behaviours exhibited by other species.
Take art. We tend to ask questions like: were the circular stone assemblies discovered in a cave near Bruniquel in southern France in 2016 meant by their Neanderthal creators as monuments? What is the significance of the Neanderthal handprints and ladder designs painted on the walls of three caves in Spain?
In both cases, we would be asking the wrong questions, says Sykes. While striking, Neanderthal art “might not be a massive cognitive leap for hominins who probably already understood the idea of representation”.
Animal footprints are effectively symbols and tracking prey this way “requires an ‘idealised’ form to be kept in mind”, she writes.
Human infants, given painting materials, enjoy colouring and marking surfaces, though they aren’t in the least bit invested in the end result of their labours. The same is also true of captive chimpanzees. Why, then, should we see Neanderthal art with any significance, beyond the possibility that Neanderthals had fun making it?
Neanderthal DNA contains glimmers of encounters between them and other hominin species. Recent research suggests that interbreeding between Neanderthals and Denisovans, as well as Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, was effectively the norm. Like modern cattle and yaks, we were closely related species that varied in bodies and behaviours, yet could also reproduce.
Neanderthals were part of our family, and though we carry some part of them inside us, we will never see their like again.
Who were the Neanderthals?Hear Rebecca Wragg Sykes talk about our ancient cousinsFor details about this virtual event visit newscientist.com/events
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Unknown Origins sees a murderer recreate superhero origin stories in an entertaining caper set in Madrid. During production, comic fans mobbed its comic-book store set, thinking it was real. On Netflix from 28 August.
Read
Terra Incognita by Ian Goldin and Robert Muggah features “100 maps to survive the next 100 years”, showing how people, cities, wars, climates and technology are changing Earth.

Leonardo Santamaria for NPR

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Invisibilia tells sumptuously produced tales of scientific wonder as Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin explore the hidden forces shaping our behaviours, ideas and beliefs in this NPR podcast.
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A film about electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla makes interesting creative choices, such as imagining an alternative future. But it spends too much time focusing on Thomas Edison

Humans 19 August 2020
By Bethan Ackerley
Tesla leaves you more interested in Thomas Edison (Kyle MacLachlan)
IFC FILMS

Tesla
Michael Almereyda
Out 21 August

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TO MANY, Nikola Tesla is a folk hero. He is a steady fixture in science fiction, and his role in the war over whether alternating or direct current should be used to transmit electricity in the late 19th century has cemented him in the popular imagination as a slayer of giants. Take that, Thomas Edison.
In Tesla, director Michael Almereyda makes hay out of that war and other events from the visionary inventor’s life, but not without including a few fantastical turns of his own.
The film begins with Tesla (Ethan Hawke) working at Edison Machine Works, where he butts heads with his employer over funding. Edison (Kyle MacLachlan) is bullish and xenophobic, asking Tesla, who was born in what is now Croatia, if he has ever eaten human flesh.
The depictions of Edison’s attempts to discredit alternating current, from using it to kill animals in public demonstrations to the botched electrocution of a prisoner, is well-trodden ground for people familiar with his ruthlessness.
Yet the film achieves more nuance in its brief flashes of Edison’s personal life than it ever does with Tesla’s. A biopic that leaves you more interested in the subject’s rival has gone wrong somewhere.

Part of this failure comes from the moments that the film prioritises. Tesla’s poverty after leaving Edison’s firm and being swindled by his own business partners is mentioned only briefly, for instance, in favour of repetitive demonstrations of his induction motor that have none of the visual dynamism such a revolutionary invention deserves. “No sparks,” one observer notes.
“Tesla’s poverty after leaving Edison’s firm and being swindled is mentioned only briefly”
The story is periodically interrupted by Anne Morgan (Eve Hewson), the daughter of one of Edison’s principal investors, who sits with a laptop and offers up pithy, fourth-wall-breaking context.
The film is also peppered with farcical metaphors, including ice-cream fights, rollerblading accidents and even an anachronistic rendition of Everybody Wants To Rule The World.
While these choices confuse as often as they delight, it is fitting for a Tesla biopic to take risks and display such imagination. One poignant scene asks us to envisage a world in which Edison apologises to Tesla and suggests a partnership. What could Tesla have achieved with the commercial guidance of “an enlightened hustler” like Edison?
Hawke plays Tesla as a morose workaholic, bristling with social discomfort. Though there is a degree of truth in that portrayal, Tesla was reportedly well-liked when he did socialise and had a variety of interests, with one contemporary describing him as “a poet, a philosopher, an appreciator of fine music, a linguist, and a connoisseur of food and drink”.
Such qualities are barely touched on, save for a sequence in which he is deeply moved by actress Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan), who becomes a figure of fascination. It is in his interactions with her that Hawke is finally given something to do; Bernhardt witnesses Tesla’s humiliation at the hands of Edison and the shame breaks through his taciturn shell.
Ultimately, the film rarely finds the will to be interested in the man Tesla actually was. Coupled with its incoherent – if striking – aesthetic, this means Tesla too often feels like an empty frame, or a motor without the power to keep it running.
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