The Familiarity Problem: Why We’re Biased, and What Actually Changes It
A CGU neuroscientist used brain measurements to reveal why some bias interventions succeed where others fail: Many prejudices stem less from malice than from limited exposure. The right story, told the right way, can help bridge that gap.
In 1959, a 9-year-old boy walked into a public library in Lake City, South Carolina, and asked for a library card. The librarian informed him that the library didn’t serve Black children, but he sat down and would not leave until she relented. Decades later, Ronald McNair, the boy who refused to be turned away, would become an MIT-trained physicist and NASA astronaut.
His story would also become the centerpiece of a neuroscience experiment that upended conventional thinking about how racial bias works and what it takes to change it.
Professor Paul Zak, director of CGU’s Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, wasn’t looking for a story about racial bias when he and doctoral student Yilong Wang began their research. They were asking a different question: What makes a piece of content valuable enough to change how people think and act?
The answer had profound implications for one of the vexing issues in social science.
For Wang, a complex problem like racial bias requires the transdisciplinary collaboration he specializes in. He came to CGU to work with Zak, hoping to braid together his own experience in business management and social science research.
“It’s amazing to do work in multiple fields,” he said. “If I solely talk about economics or political science, we can get trapped into niche conversations, and it doesn’t solve real-world problems. A lot of the issues we have are interconnected between fields, and no single theory can explain things. With this project, our methodology borrowed from political science, some from psychology, and some from social sciences.”
This transdisciplinary focus shaped their methodology, down to the video they chose, how they shaped the study, and the kinds of measurements they used to determine if the intervention made a difference. Participants who watched a short, animated video about McNair’s childhood showed an 11 percent reduction in racial bias and more than doubled their generosity toward people with Black-sounding names in a money-sharing task. Two weeks later, without any additional intervention, the effect remained.
A Different Diagnosis
Zak is skeptical about mandatory training programs involving diversity, equity, and inclusion. “My research suggests nearly all DEI approaches are ineffective because they start by separating individuals by race or religion or sexual orientation,” he said.
What his research showed instead was that effectively communicating how people face similar challenges, across differences, can reduce bias in ways that categorization-based approaches cannot. That distinction matters because it changes the diagnosis entirely.
“Most people have a baseline bias toward others that appear dissimilar from themselves, mostly because we interact more with those we are more similar to,” he said.
Bias, in this framing, is not a character flaw or a moral failure. It is a familiarity deficit. The brain favors what it knows. The question is whether exposure to a well-crafted story about someone’s real experience can substitute for that familiarity, and the data suggest that it can. By exposing people to unifying stories of shared experiences, Zak and Wang wanted to create familiarity.
Measuring What Moves People
For the last two decades, Zak’s lab has been developing a framework for understanding how the brain assigns value to experiences. He calls his scientific process Immersion. It looks at one-second frequency measurements of neural signals that can be captured using wearable technology, including a standard smartwatch. Experiences that show increased activity, or high immersion, his research has found, are what the brain encodes into long-term memory, which people act on and share with others. By measuring neural signals, Zak’s team can measure memory engagement.
For the bias study, Zak and Wang assembled a library of short videos and measured each participant’s levels of neurologic Immersion. The video that scored highest among participants, the one their brains consistently signaled was worth remembering, was the animated short about Ronald McNair’s childhood.
The team sent that video to a representative sample of 800 adults, while a control group of 300 watched a neutral nature video. Only the McNair group moved: the 11 percent attitude shift, the 100 percent increase in cross-racial generosity, and the two-week persistence all followed a single viewing.
“It is crazy important,” Zak said of the finding. “The brain works at millisecond frequency and is rapidly adapting to our experiences all the time, so a two-week persistence is very unusual.”
He attributes the durability to the emotional quality of the experience: “Highly emotional experiences are saved into long-term memory in a way that makes them more easily recalled. Yet the video is not overtly emotional or preachy — just neurologically valuable.”
Who Moved and Why
One of the study’s most striking findings was the pattern of whose attitudes moved most. The participants with the highest levels of bias at baseline, and who showed the largest attitudinal and behavioral shifts after watching the video, were men, younger adults, and self-identified Republicans. Zak’s interpretation pushes back against a common assumption.
“The video had no effect on those who did not have biases, because there is no way to decrease their biases further,” he noted. The implication is not that certain groups are uniquely resistant to change; it is that those with the most room to move moved the most.
Still, Zak favors broad distribution. “The actionable part of the study is to share high-immersion videos broadly — on YouTube or X — so that people of all groups choose to watch them rather than being forced to do so.”
Wang’s training in business management and social science came to fruition with this project. “It’s fascinating to combine these two fields,” he said “This research is different than having two specializations in both economics and political science. What is fundamental is passing on the knowledge and the method that we use. I’m proud of the work we do, and I hope that we can pass on this knowledge and that future groups can continue this research.”
Work in Progress
Zak has been careful about the limits of what video alone can accomplish. He points to ongoing Stanford University research showing that people who spend significant time with individuals of different racial backgrounds develop little or no bias toward those groups because they stop categorizing them as “other” and begin seeing them as individuals.
“Videos can only go so far in doing this,” he acknowledged. “But we don’t know yet when this breaks down.”
Wang described the impact as “medium term,” and that, “although we only tested for a two-week time period, I hope that we can see how long these results last. However, the results were reliable across the study.”
The ethical question of whether using neuroscience to engineer emotional responses constitutes manipulation is one that Zak has thought about carefully. His answer returns to consent and coercion. Persuasion is ethical when people are free to say no, when they are not rushed, and when the intent is transparent. He publishes in open-access journals and writes for general audiences precisely so that the methodology is available to everyone, not just those with resources to deploy it unilaterally.
“Social creatures are always trying to influence others,” he said. “My research shows how to do this effectively — and this is ethical as long as there is no coercion.”
Things Worth Remembering
Storytellers like filmmakers, journalists, and educators have long known that a well-crafted narrative can move people. What Zak’s research has done is give that intuition an empirical foundation. After more than 50,000 brain observations across 15 years of research, he believes that the data is unambiguous: Storytelling is the most effective vehicle for changing attitudes and behavior.
The peer-reviewed study on which this piece is based was published in open access, and the McNair video used in the research can be viewed on YouTube.