Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 <inaudible>.
Speaker 1 00:04 This is the annex, the sociology podcast. I'm Joseph Cohen from the City University of New York today. Neuro sociology with Rangan Furat from the University of California at Riverside. Our discussion was recorded on August 12th, 2019
Speaker 0 00:21 <inaudible>.
Speaker 2 00:25 Okay. We're here with ring in for rot. A sociologist from a UC Riverside. Rangin has a pretty long publication and impressive publication list. I have to stay. She led a 2017 paper called putting race in context target social class, modulates processing of race in the VMP FC and the Amygdala in social cognitive. And thank you very much <inaudible> the neuroscience. And recently she published opening the black box functions of the frontal lobes center and their implications for sociology in our frontiers in sociology. That was this year. And Rangan is a neuro sociologist w which is a crazy topic. So thank you so much for sitting down with us.
Speaker 3 01:13 Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah,
Speaker 2 01:16 yeah. I'm happy to just get an explanation. It sounds like an amazing field. Your uh, your publications sounds so impressive and I'm trying to get my head around it. Tell me what is neuro sociology?
Speaker 3 01:29 Somebody said it is so exciting. It is a very new subfield of sociology and actually the people have been writing about it for a while, like they get Franks and the last decade or so. But the research, the empirical part of it is pretty new. So it is a sub field that I am trying to pop up their eyes and get people, family your eyes a bit. So neuro sociology is a sociological theory and method that uses neurological methodologies and theories. My research particularly uses brain imaging, functional magnetic resonance imaging to understand the mental, the subtle mental processes of social behavior, like racial bias, ethnic relationships, political behavior, political attitudes. So it gives us a micro lens into what is going on in human mind, human brain.
Speaker 2 02:21 Wow. Can you explain maybe an experiment that you've conducted, like describe it and then give us a sense of the insights that you got from your appearance? Yeah,
Speaker 3 02:30 yeah, absolutely. So in one of the papers that you just mentioned, the title eight, that is a functional MRI, a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, which means that I put people in this huge um, fish inside a huge scanner. They could lie down on a table, the table scopes and the scanner and they are looking at pictures. So this is a very basic paradigm. This is a very standard social psychological experiment there. I manipulated the pictures so the pictures were of people from different racial and social class groups. So I wanted to investigate how our brains process art group and in group race and social class members. And the motto by main findings is that unlike very a lot of psychology research argues that like fear and aversion or anxiety might be involved. I show that it's actually mostly emotions like pride, sympathy, more. The emotions are also important in our brain. Regions that are associated with these emotions are, we can see the activation in them when people are looking at pictures of let's say white middle class versus black middle class people. So this is one of the revelations of one of my articles.
Speaker 2 03:48 Can you flush this out? Like so you're saying that you see you're, you're looking at different emotional linkages with sort of the types of things that we in sociology study, like ethnic conflict or a bias or things like that. You're using brain scans to get a sense of the raw emotions that are triggered by the phenomenon we study. Exactly. Amazing. And when you say like pride is part of bias, like what do you mean? Like what, what's going on there?
Speaker 3 04:18 It is a very interesting emotion. It is a moral emotion and it is in a very human emotion. It builds us, it builds communities, right? We feel pride when we do our moral obligations. Interesting. There's this human emotion as moral emotion. What I find is that it is absorbed more for our in groups. It is more VC, more pride for our in groups. I binds people. So it just becomes this part of this racial hierarchy in a subtle way. So a positive emotion like pride maybe is reserved for people that we admire. People like us.
Speaker 2 04:57 Huh? So what you're saying like, so for example, I'm a Canadian and let's say we were studying national bias. Uh, what you're saying is I might latch onto my Canadian identity and think that national affiliation is salient and want to keep it salient. Because when I reflect on Canadianness, I feel the emotion of pride in it's not something that I'd want to give up. Is that what you're saying? Yes. And that might be a motive why people have such difficulty getting rid of their attachment to identities that
Speaker 3 05:33 exactly. Because a lot of the social biases but I argue are immoral biases. So it is the, it's the moral hierarchy.
Speaker 2 05:42 Okay. What do you mean by that? Like our biases, our moral, what does that mean? They
Speaker 3 05:47 are socially constructed as most sociologists would argue with me. What it actually also means that racial categorization is not inevitable. We change that. This is relying on a moral hierarchy, our system, our discourse, our legal system, our institutions, which build not only are the lies and the legality of things, but also a moral system. The way we think about things, the baby feel about things which are very important. And because a lot of recent research in neurology actually shows that moral emotions are more important than moral cognition in deciding our behavior. So they are more automatic, they are fast. So they are more important than in things like racial bias. Okay. So from what I'm gathering from you is, so for example, let's say we want to combat racism by engaging people with rational arguments, we say, well, it's not actually true that this group is more dangerous or it's not actually true that this, what you're saying is that that's not going to help.
Speaker 3 06:53 It's not going to help. You're not going to help at all. Exactly. It is an intuitive reaction. So people feel it in their guts. So we have to go back and change those gut feelings. Wow. So that is the whole argument and that's what I'm trying to do. Find veys find mechanisms that might buffer these gut reactions by looking at the brain and the body. What other emotions did you see that a touch people to let say race or ethnic ideology or their ethnic identity and racism or you know, an ethnocentric view of the world. <inaudible> emotions other than pride. Um, emotions like disgust for example. So it is not appear hatred, but it is as if that group is not even a human category. And I even observed some regions in the human brain that are, um, so I also showed them pictures of objects and animals nonhuman things.
Speaker 3 07:52 And then you find similarities in brain activation when people look at pictures of maybe like a spider or pictures of a dirty toilet or a dirty thing, stigmatized when they are also looking at pictures of stigmatized arch groups. Wow. Especially the racial and social class arch crypts. So this has like big implications. So it's like, it's almost like, I mean if disgust is a motivator, you're like, uh, you could see how people, if it, they wouldn't even want to be near the, the stigmatize groups. Yeah. A lot of moral distancing. And there's a big literature also in psychology on dehumanization. So more of the emotions are very important in dehumanization. Wow. Yeah. But what a lot of this research doesn't look as the social structural context of these things. How does social class play into that? How does race play into that in your research?
Speaker 3 08:48 Have you looked at how these emotions get attached to identities or are we just at the point where we're just establishing these lists? Establishing at this point there are some recent research, um, on Har like the more developmental aspects of it, but it is still pretty recent at this point. At the time, and I did this study, I actually collected my data around 2015 or nudge earlier then in 2010, 11, 2000, 10, 11. That was, um, one of the first studies that had both social class and race. So because a lot of the psychologists were just thinking race as one uniform GADIG Ori as sociologists, we think that race is also class-based, right? So racial categories
Speaker 2 09:32 so that like we might be attuned to the possibility that like a higher economic class person might view a co ethnic with discussed if they're from a different economic class, for example.
Speaker 3 09:42 Yes, but this is very subtle. That's my, it is very difficult to capture with very traditional sociological methods like surveys or interviews. And I actually debriefed all my subjects that as I had conversations with every single one of them and they were, all of them are there, they're all nice people and they're like, oh, are so glad that you're studying racism. You want it to end. Right. So they are all very Perot supportive of this type of research. But still, when we look at people's brains, we see the difference
Speaker 2 10:11 if they have the visceral response. Yes. Wow. What other ones? Just to give me one or two more. I hate to do this. I love it. I'm really enjoying this. Yeah, the emotions. It's, you know, it's interesting because it, when you describe these phenomenon in such sort of narrow emotional terms, you realize that for example, when you think of racism, you're sort of imputing a particular type of caricature of a person with motivations or reactions or beliefs. And when the emotions that you describe are different from what you know is the caricature of my head of a racist or anything like to think of it as involving pride or involving disgust, it makes so much sense. It shapes the way you think about it. Like I'm just enjoying this fleshing out. So maybe one more and then we can move on.
Speaker 3 10:59 I actually looked at four basic and for moral emotions and discuss this sometimes basic, sometimes moral. So I also looked at fear and anger and happiness for the moral emotions, enemy enemies and it's end music advan really? Yes, and I found differences than enemy. So I also studied patients who have damage to their a certain brain regions in the same article and there's a part of the brain is called The v one. It's in the title, the VM PFC Ventromedial, ventral medial prefrontal core disease. That's the kind of in the front but also like medially located middle part of the brain. That part is the underlying region for moral emotions and especially emotions like pride and envy. And 1:00 AM one of the things I found was that when in my, uh, subject group that did not have that region, either gigi a tumor or a stroke, I reason or another, they showed very different responses than people who did not have any damage.
Speaker 3 12:01 So they were actually showing you more biased responses. So they were reporting even more enemy, even more pride for their ingroup or they couldn't. And there is like no conditioning type of emotion. Why do emotions interact with each other? Do they like fight each other? Um, they might, I think, yeah, I think they absolutely interact with each other and it is possible I think, and to hold all these emotions that might be conflicting with each other as well. You know, what makes a lot of sense. I mean there are, so for example, I can think of co ethnics with me that I don't, on a visceral level, I don't have positive reactions and it might condition how totally I be or how central my ethnicity would be to my personal identity because there's these multiple degrees. So the basic idea here is that because humans, we have not evolved to have racist, they have not evolved, they have ethnicities.
Speaker 3 12:54 But the basic ideas that then we look at human evolution. Humans have evolved to have correlations because in order to survive back into time, we need to be able to establish partnerships because we are social animals to go hunting or um, to fight even another tribe. We need to be able to establish this coalitions say a lot of the neural architecture that currently defines racial bias is actually a neural architecture that has evolved to track coalitional affiliations. So the same thing with political alliances, Huh? It's all tribal. You know, you hear a lot of political scientists now saying that Trump, you know, tribal behavior sits at the root of a lot of political behavior. And you're saying that there's like there's almost a program our, our emotions get mobilized to shape our behavior to be sort of pro in group or pro pro tribe and these in groups and are the so-called tribes would depend on our quote unquote social programming, the groups that we are involved in.
Speaker 3 13:56 Um, our education system, our legal system, all these sociological factors. So that's what neuroscience, geology is looking at all these sociological factors and trying to figure out how they affect the microbiological processes. Wow. And what, what issues have you tackled in that? Like with this type of approach, this type of paradigm, what problems or social issues or concepts have you explored using this approach? So far? I have looked at, um, so other than this racial bias in a very, in another recent study I looked at social exclusion, the effects of being excluded. And um, so the brain when I found, which is similar to other studies is that the effects of when people are socially excluded, the brain regions that are activated in response to physical pain are activated, really feel social pain as if it is physical pain. And that's why I like isolated confinement
Speaker 2 14:52 is considered such a harsh penalty. It is a social punishment and we feel it bodily. It's like a physical punishment. What's the, is it, is it like we're pack animals and we need to like what's the evolutionary biology?
Speaker 3 15:04 Yeah, pack animals. One of the basic arguments is that if you need to be grooming each other, do it with language because of our group size, like Dunbar's rule is I'm like God, I don't know rules, I think it was m so it's the number of people and if you were at a bar, it is the number of people that you would bump into and could have a small conversation if you're not being awkward. Okay. Okay. So it is dumb or Israel is that this number has an Achillea BREEAM and humans have evolved in this em, so we could hold, I think about, I think it was 150 if I'm not mistaken. So this is the number of people that we could sustain in our communities. If it was a small number, like 10 <inaudible>, we did not need a lot of social rules. So you would not need language maybe, right. You would not need a lot of our symbols and gestures. Right. But because we have evolved to be in bigger groups, right? Not Mass, not the Ma, not like mass market society. Right. But big enough that we need to be able to use the symbols and the gestures and an abstract language to be able to solve problems.
Speaker 2 16:13 That's interesting though. So it's like, right. Are you saying is the idea that there is like a natural group size? This is down, this is what <inaudible> and there is some big eh, this periods of there's, this is a conversation of this m but it's an idea. It's an idea that's out there.
Speaker 3 16:31 Does the theory, at least that shows the social-ness of humans. How at VR, very social animals. So my, I have colleagues that are primatologists, right? That study macaque monkeys, they study chimpanzees and orangutans and they're also social animals. And we could see the basic, even certain moral capacities like fairness, perceptions of fairness in other primates and monkeys.
Speaker 2 16:55 Wait a minute. So like a lot of the Ingroup outgroup behavior that we exhibit, you know, is this like we're thinking of a universe of like up to 150 people who are sealing it to us and we mobilize like these type of Schema on behalf of our group of one 50 is that it? Yeah.
Speaker 3 17:11 That will be one theory about that. Or at least because human cognition is not evolved in a mess in a modern society with millions of people living in a modern nation states. Maybe we are thinking by me, think about our nationality of, and we're thinking about our political groups or racial groups. Right. We are thinking about them as more concrete, smaller tribal groups. Huh.
Speaker 2 17:36 Literally also it's like wow, that makes it hard to imagine a social system where there's not this animous cause there's always, if such small groups are salient, then you're always going to have like an ingroup and outgroup
Speaker 3 17:49 is that, and it's just, we're programmed to be like that. Is that the idea or anything? They're always going to have an in group and off-script, but it doesn't mean that army cannot expand our ingroup. Right. That's another thing I'm studying. So I'm, I'm very interested in studying human values as, as sub component of human morality. And one of the values that I'm interested in is self transcendence. So this is the, it is the valuing people or groups that are beyond your immediate self and immediate Ingrid. Okay. So I'm getting an immediate reciprocation. Would you contribute money to your cause? Would you go and help us change it on the street? Do you support equality? Do you support the affair of other people? So it's like you're, you're trying to, it's like reorienting these categories that we have in our head that we react viscerally towards.
Speaker 3 18:42 Yes. Hello. And one of the things I'm interested in is that, does this value orientation, could it help buffer racial bias and stress that might be caused by inter-ethnic contact? So that's one of the things I'm looking at that. So that's the new project I'm launching UC Riverside to see whether or not we could look at these different values as mechanisms to buffer interethnic stress. You said that you have some ideas of intervention that come up. Can you give us sort of an overview of that? Yeah, exactly. So, um, I'm interested in two value prototypes. So one of them would be self-transcendence, which I, which is um, uh, establish actually value domain <inaudible> values theory. I kind of turn it around a little bit and I conceptualize it as a communal reality. I say communalism. So one of the things I'm interested in is that can we increase common Ellison and how can we do that?
Speaker 3 19:39 What if I put people in groups where they cooperate more, how could they cooperate more? Could we create a common symbol, common language. So that will be one bay. And other value that I'm interested in, this is a concept that is also feminist sociologists and might be contentious, is agency, the concept of agency. So I also argued at agentic values. Being able to manipulate your environment, being open to new ideas and new experiences might also help some people and protect efforts. So in one of the manipulations that I am trying to develop, for example, I'm asking people to recall the Times that they have put in an effort to come up with creative ways to certain problems. That's mine, me and some other way of, in another manipulation I'm looking at colonial values and more implicit priming. Try, they just read a text describing a situation and we could just change the pronouns from <inaudible> to be so like Venus, like reading something with the language that says we and our and ours might prime people to think more community. Like have you done any research along
Speaker 2 20:48 these lines or is this the direction you're looking at?
Speaker 3 20:49 Yeah, so my uh, last brain imaging study, functional MRI study, I use these priming methods to look at how they buffer social pain in the brain, social exclusion related pain in the brain. And I find that communalism especially is helping minority groups. I hit African American and Caucasian subjects. So, especially the African American subjects benefited from Camino values, but I'm still analyzing my data. I need to do all my checks and balances and wow. So this is a paper in progress.
Speaker 2 21:18 Wow. Wow. I have to say. Okay, well this has been amazing. What a line of research. That's neuro sociology. First of all, if, if someone's, you know, just exposed to this for the first time, might not have the biology background, like let's say an early career Grad student who might not have come here from a bio background, how did it start it on this young person who's interested? Right.
Speaker 3 21:41 A really good question. A lot of students actually asked me that question and I am, I don't know the best answer. Of course, I just tell them what I did and what I'm, it also depends on each person and their institutions and what are available options. So I took a lot, it was difficult. I took a lot of extra classes. I check neurology classes, I checked medical near Anatomy and neuro psychology courses to kind of have a background in this. So I did a lot of research in the neurology department. I attended a lot of neurology meetings. Huh. And so that I'm exposed to other people's research and I check all this coursework and all my dissertation, Merck, I completed in the neurology clinic.
Speaker 2 22:24 Really? So wait, you sort of did all of this over the course of your sociology doctorate? Yes. We'll find all the sociology. Wow. We'll see. That's what it takes. And you basically need to get two PhDs at once, Huh?
Speaker 3 22:34 That's what I'm trying to change in the discipline I in at UC Riverside, what I'm trying to establish with the courses I teach and the research training I offer is to introduce my students to this training without having to go into a neurology department. Wow. So basically they could train. Of course they would not be a change in neurologists, but at least I could teach them the methods. I know I could teach him. Yes, exactly. They could be a nurse. Sociologist.
Speaker 2 23:00 Wow. Why? First of all, I, it's so impressed. Wow. I'm like blown away. What a line of research I like. I'm very humbled to be hearing all of this. It sounds incredible. And I guess the answer in brief is if you want to be a neuro sociologist while then head over to UC Riverside, I had to look up Reagan for rot cause that's definitely, that's where it's at.
Speaker 3 23:24 Yeah. Or feel free to email me with any questions. I am like very habit answer students and other colleagues questions. <inaudible>
Speaker 2 23:31 wow. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much. This was incredible. Yeah, that's Rangin for rot from the sociology department at the University of California at Riverside, introducing us to the extremely field
Speaker 1 23:46 of neuro sociology. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. You've been listening to the annex, the sociology podcast. A special thank you to Rangan Firat from the University of California at Riverside. We're on the web socio cast.org/antics on Facebook, the annex sociology podcast, and on Twitter at <inaudible> Chantix. Our producers are f Merino, Jaylene Cologne and Fonzie and Mohamed. I'm Joe Cohen. Thanks for listening.
