Decisions & Discrimination

Discrimination refers to noticing differences and making choices based on evaluating differences. One of the trends in neuroscience involves  understanding of how decisions are made. You could argue that detecting and responding to differences is the most universal strategy in animal brains.

Humans are good at detecting differences and make millisecond decisions that have a lasting influence on their subsequent decision making procedures. The kind and degree of difference is always in flux and depends on prior learning, context and social status. Discrimination is a deeply imbedded property of the human mind that is expressed in almost every human behavior we might consider. However, discrimination as a popular topic is often a misinterpretation of the normal activity of noticing and acting on differences.

In popular debates, discrimination is treated as an aberration. Terms that end in “ism” and “ist” are often used to describe discriminating people in a derogatory manner. Thus anyone with a different ancestry who disagrees with you becomes a racist.

This is not to argue that noticing differences is always positive. It is to argue that humans base a lot of their decisions on noticing differences. In a positive mode, the description “a discriminating shopper” identifies human who notices differences in design and quality of manufacture, choosing high quality products rather than cheap ones.

We have recognized that group membership is all important to humans. You recognize familiar humans who speak and act like yourself as members of your group. In a crowd you notice humans who display small differences in speech, costume and behavior. Most often these small differences are the basis for shunning or ignoring the “strange” humans. In the most rigid groups, everyone wears the same costume, repeats the same polite language, with the same intonation and behaves in a predicable, ritualistic manner. 

We have recognized that racial and ethnic boundaries exist but obvious boundaries are not required for discrimination.

The ideal of an egalitarian society is to recognize the merit of individuals; to allow social mobility based on learning and achievement; and to protect individual expressions by social policy and law, but human nature does not change. Group preferences and boundaries that separate groups can always be identified.

Neuroscience Notes places the human brain at the center of the universe. Since the brain is the organ of the mind, consciousness and all knowledge is contained within the brain.

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Neuroscience Notes

	Human Brain in Health and Disease
	Intelligence and Learning

Neuroscience Notes is published by Persona Digital Books. Copyright Persona Digital 2010 and all rights to reproduction by any means are reserved. We encourage readers to quote and paraphrase topics from Neuroscience Notes published online and expect proper citations to accompany all derivative writings. The author is Stephen Gislason. The date of publication is 2010. The URL to the book description is http://www.personadigital.net/Persona/Neuroscience/