Racist? There's now a pill you can take to cure it.

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Racist? There’s now a pill you can take to cure it.

While most racism is a social disease that comes from upbringing, peer pressure and other ways of social reinforcement, there are some people who are just biologically racist. Well, everyone’s a little racist in that there’s only a small number of people that you can consider your “tribe” and everyone else is “other” and scary, but research into a heart medicine has yielded a surprising side effect— it seems to cure racism.

Propranolol is a beta-blocker that’s used to reduce blood pressure, but the Oxford study found that it has the peripheral side effect of reducing subconscious racism, which is triggered by the autonomic nervous system. The study took 36 white males and gave half 40mg of Propranolol, and half a placebo. Then after two hours they were made to categorize words like “happy” and “evil,” and also black and white people’s faces. There was a statistically relevant enough difference in the groups to lead the scientists to believe that the drug can actually have an effect on racial bias.

Clearly, this is a very small sample size consisting entirely of white males, but that is still fairly astounding and okay yes ridiculous. It will all be much more astounding and believable after a much wider sample is submitted.

The researchers involved in the study say that right now, the side effect is a curiosity and might lead to a better understanding of how the brain works, but no one is going to making a racism-curing pill any time soon or putting this stuff in the water supply.

Via