Lara Maister, Mel Slater, Maria V. Sanchez-Vives, and Manos Tsakitis, ‘Changing Bodies Changes Minds: Owning Another Body Affects Social Cognition’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 6-12.

Experiments have shown that implicit biases against people of other races (that is, statistically significant negative associations for one ‘outgroup’ or another) are common and stubborn. Maister et al. describe some experiments that offer a novel way of diminishing these unconscious effects. It seems that what they call ‘manipulations of body-ownership’, wherein subjects are presented with illusory evidence that they in fact have a body of another race, result in modifications to cognitive biases, as if the experience of inhabiting a body produces an affinity that stops an outgroup being an outgroup any more.
      The experimenters give subjects the impression that a filmed hand, or face, or whole body, is in fact their own. By making a black woman look into a ‘mirror’ (actually a screen) in which a white woman’s face is being stroked in the same way that hers is, it is possible to give the subject a very limited, but apparently significant experience of actually owning a body of another race. The result of this experience, within the duration of the experimental process at least, is a reduction in implicit biases against the race in question. Maister et al. hypothesize that the ‘self-concept’ of an individual is derived partly from their sense of inhabiting a particular body, with its particular characteristics. It is this self-concept that generates the dynamics of ‘same’ and ‘other’ that drive prejudice; and this self-concept can be manipulated with body-ownership illusions.
      In the ‘Outstanding Questions’ box on p. 11 there are two pretty big ones: (i) ‘What is the time course of these effects? Are they persistent over time? (ii) Do these changes in implicit associations have behavioural consequences in daily life? Any socially productive consequences of these findings – avatar-based racist rehabilitation campaigns? – are evidently a long way off. Nevertheless the authors are hopeful that their model of body-ownership and self-concept offers a relatively simple way to understand and then to get past harmful biases.
      The experiments rely on the brain’s resourceful efforts to reconcile touch-sensations with visual evidence. Nevertheless, they seem to be immersive experiences wherein the sensory and intellectual lives of ‘others’ are brought, in a very limited way, to life. In this respect they have something in common with literature. Fictional experiences are not so vividly or mundanely prosthetic as those in the experiments; but still it seems possible – though perhaps glib – to imagine that white readers of The Color Purple had their implicit biases tested or modified by exposure to a version of the experience of African-American characters.

*

My mind turned to Shakespeare as always, and I wondered whether Othello or Shylock, characters that gave Shakespeare’s first audiences a vivid version of what it is to live in Europe as a Moor or a Jew, would seem to offer anything salutary to compare with the body-ownership idea. What I found seem to me like two famous but troubling moments in the plays where there is an initial move towards the possibility of shared experience, before it is quickly diverted. Shylock famously invokes common humanity:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge.

The main difference with the experiments cited above is of course that there is no illusion that any part of Shylock’s body is actually ours. However, there is in invitation to situate one’s familiar experience of having eyes and senses, feeling hurt and disease, and so on, in a Jewish body – to recognise the things that unite society’s groups. Shylock follows this through quickly, however, into what is really at stake: this is all about revenge, and the only commonality that really matters is revenge, and any well-meaning attempt to in-group the out-group is rebuffed. Knowing an ‘other’ isn’t a simple matter of temporary empathetic inhabitation.

*

Othello is welcomed into Brabantio’s home and finds himself drawn deeper into his family. The physical difference between the Moor and the Venetians is referred to frequently, but when he begins to relate his adventures, the scene offers the possibility that this will reveal more similarity than difference. His struggles will be everyone’s – they will feel his pain, and their bias against him will diminish. Desdemona is an open door for this and it duly happens. But the speech turns towards the unrelatable as if to ward off attempts to over-relate:

Her father loved me; oft invited me;
Still question’d me the story of my life,
From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
That I have passed.
I ran it through, even from my boyish days,
To the very moment that he bade me tell it;
Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field
Of hair-breadth scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels’ history:
Wherein of vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak, — such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house-affairs would draw her thence:
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She’ld come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse.

Just when it seems as if Othello will reveal himself to have lived a life anyone could understand, pity, love, and feel, he turns briefly towards things that are hard to believe in or empathise with: encounters with strangely shaped humans in far-off lands. Later in the play the exotic magic of his handkerchief may play a similar role.
      There are enough differences between what is happening in the experiments, and what’s happening in The Merchant of Venice and Othello, for any attempt to make them speak to one another to be rather difficult. Maister et al. have an idea that a physical experience of inhabiting a certain kind of body – however illusory it may be – reconditions bias against such a body. Intuitively this seems believable, and the experiments demonstrate the possibility in a concrete (and blunt) way. Shakespeare, perhaps, turns instead to the particularity of the difference of Shylock and Othello: he won’t let them settle into anything like the role of an ownable other.