MICHEL MARTIN, HOST: Now we have another guest who has a very interesting perspective on what we just talked about. He says that a lot of racist behavior may stem from the belief held by many white people that African-Americans do not actually feel as much pain. Jason Silverstein looked into what he calls the racial empathy gap as part of his work with Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research. He wrote about this in the recent Slate article "I Don't Feel Your Pain," and he's with us now. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.
JASON SILVERSTEIN: Thank you for having me.
MARTIN: Now you drew, for your piece in Slate, on research that was actually published in May of 2011. It was published in Italy. And in the piece, you said that when white people were shown a picture of a white person in pain, they actually reacted differently than they did when the person was black. Could you talk a little bit more about that?
SILVERSTEIN: Sure. So basically what had happened was the researchers decided to show a group of participants videos, videos of people who were experiencing the same stimuli. One was very painful, or at least might appear to be, a needle touching their skin. And another was potentially harmless, just an eraser. And it turned out that when viewers saw the white people receiving a painful stimuli, they responded much more dramatically than they did for black people. This wasn't the only time we've seen this. We've seen this in other studies, as well. And this is basically what we call the racial empathy gap.
MARTIN: But you also noted that, you know, that African-Americans also experienced this, that they also - that there have been studies that've shown that African-Americans also don't react as strongly when they are shown pictures of black people in pain. Why might that be? And, I mean...
SILVERSTEIN: Sure.
MARTIN: You think there's a global explanation. And what is the global explanation for why that is, the theory?
SILVERSTEIN: Well, there was a follow-up that was done, and it basically then tried to look at white people, it tried to look at black people and it also tried to look at nurses and nursing students 'cause this is a big problem that we have with black people not getting pain medicine when they need it the most. And what these researchers found was that all of the participants, white, black, nurses, nursing students, all assumed that black people felt less pain than white people.
And what they said was, well, it doesn't really make sense to say that racial prejudice or animosity is entirely to blame here. It may be something else. And when they pressed on this, they started to see that it had a lot to do with whether or not participants assumed that black people in the study had faced more hardship or more adversity. And basically, what they ended up seeing was that they felt that black people could just sort of take more pain. And we can see how this - it just creates this cycle of pain, then. Right?
