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Racial stereotypes and expectations can impact the way we communicate and understand others, according to UBC research. The new study, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, highlights how non-verbal "social cues" - such as photographs of Chinese Canadians - can affect how we comprehend speech.
"This research brings to light our internal biases, and the role of experience and stereotypes, in how we listen to and hear each other," says Molly Babel, the paper's lead author and an assistant professor with UBC's Department of Linguistics.
One of the study's tasks involved participants from the UBC community transcribing pre-recorded sentences amid background static. The sentences were recorded by 12 native speakers of Canadian English. Half of the speakers self-identified as White, and the other half self-identified as Chinese. All speakers were born and raised in Richmond, B.C., which is south of Vancouver.
The pre-recorded sentences were accompanied by either black and white photos of the speakers, or by an image of three crosses. Overall, listeners found the Chinese Canadians more difficult to understand than the White Canadians - but only when they were made aware that the speaker was Chinese Canadian due to the photo prompt.
Participants were also asked to rate the strength of the accents of the speakers. They were asked to listen to two sentences from each speaker - one accompanied by the speaker's photo, the other by an image of crosses. "Once participants were aware that they were listening to a White Canadian, suddenly the candidate was perceived as having less of a foreign accent and sounding more like a native speaker of Canadian English," says Babel.
"It tells us as listeners that we need to be sensitive about the stereotypes that we carry," notes Jamie Russell, the study's co-author who was an undergraduate honours student in UBC's Department of Linguistics during the project.
http://phys.org/news/2015-05-racial-stereotypes-impact.html
[Abstract]: http://scitation.aip.org/content/asa/journal/jasa/137/5/10.1121/1.4919317
[Source]: http://news.ubc.ca/2015/05/26/how-racial-stereotypes-impact-the-way-we-communicate/
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by RedBear on Friday May 29 2015, @09:16PM
No. Although that might be a small aspect of this for some individuals, I don't believe that comes close to explaining the bulk of the phenomenon.
What's going on here is relatively simple. What we've been learning for several decades, bit by bit, is that we (and by "we" I mean the imaginary "self" inside our minds that is observing and attempting to interact with the universe around our physical bodies) only perceive our physical universe very dimly, as if through a thick veil or through the branches of a tree filled with leaves fluttering in the wind. When you _think_ you're reading these words, your brain is really only seeing the basic shapes, the places where the image on the screen goes from light to dark. When you're driving down the road, you _think_ you're seeing an almost 200-degree field of vision quite sharply and in full color, but really your brain is only seeing things sharply and in color within a small cone of your central vision, a few degrees in diameter at most. When you are in a room full of people speaking your native language, you _think_ you're hearing all sorts of conversations accurately and completely, but really what your brain is hearing is the "edges" of various sound-patterns that it has gotten used to "mapping" into complete words or even complete sentences. You don't actually _hear_ all of the audio data you think you're hearing, anymore than you actually see all the visual data you think you're seeing.
You see, the brain has absolutely massive amounts of processing power focused entirely on "filling in" all the missing bits and pieces of what we can't perceive in real-time. What we believe we are hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling or feeling at any given time is actually about 99% fake. Made-up. Not real. And quite often it literally doesn't quite match what's actually there. While our perception is quite wonderful and give us an amazing experience of the universe around us, it is not always entirely accurate due largely to the fact that so much information is interpolated from relatively small amounts of data. What's truly amazing is that our interpolated senses are as accurate as they are.
This, incidentally, is why "magic" a.k.a. "sleight of hand" is still so effective on us not just as children but as adults as well. Illusionists take advantage of the rather large gaps in our perception to make us believe something is happening that really isn't. That the coin really just vanished into thin air, or a dove came from nowhere. Fellow illusionists usually can't be fooled, but not because they have superhuman perception. Rather, the illusionist understands how the trick is being performed, and _which_ trick is being performed, and already has a mental map of the tiny, telltale visual signs that give the trick away. But if you take an expert illusionist and have him devise a new trick which purposefully gives off a telltale sign identical to some other trick, even other illusionists can often be fooled, because they aren't really seeing any more information than you or I would be seeing.
So what's happening is that these people in the test really do understand the Caucasian-appearing Canadian speaker better than the Chinese-appearing Canadian speaker (at least after they see what the speaker looks like), because their brain is still applying the correct mapping to the sparse incoming audio data from the Caucasian-appearing speaker. Meanwhile their brain is now applying a different, slightly-incorrect mapping to the same sparse incoming audio data from the Chinese-appearing speakers. The Chinese-appearing speaker quite literally becomes "difficult to understand", even though their speech did not change at all. The next step is learning to get our brains to stop switching to an incorrect mapping in order to try and match a visual stereotype that has no relevance. We already seem to have some basic de-conditioning techniques, such as showing a non-Chinese-appearing Canadian a projected image of themselves as a Chinese-appearing Canadian and letting them watch themselves speak for a while. This could allow the brain to shift into using the same audio mapping for Chinese-appearing and Caucasian-appearing speakers.
You've probably actually experienced something like this (a shifting of a mental map) at some point in your life, if you've ever spent any considerable amount of time listening to people with thick "foreign" accents. At some point, if you listen enough, suddenly something just clicks into place and you find you have no more trouble understanding someone whose speak you couldn't comprehend just five minutes earlier. That's your brain either figuring out the mapping on the fly or applying a previously-learned mapping that "fits" the data better.
This test explains quite well why so many people perceive "foreign-appearing" people as having bad manners, bad speech and various other stereotypical issues, even though an unbiased observer will often say there is no difference between a native-looking person and a foreign-looking person, as long as they don't know what those two people look like.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ