Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, welcomed the research, but said using brain scans as a test for racism would not be useful.
"We spend far too much time worried about trying to detect racism in people rather than circumscribing the behavior which leads to bias," he said. "There are people who have racist attitudes who are perfectly fair and even-handed in the ways they treat people, and there are people who would think of themselves as committed anti-racists who consistently show bias in the way they behave."
Gehring, who helped to write the journal's accompanying article, disputes some of the study's conclusions: "These are very important empirical findings concerning the mental processes that go on when people interact with someone of a different race, but what these findings mean is not clarified yet. You have to be very careful about how you interpret them."
He said IAT scores are not necessarily an accurate measure of an individual's racial bias, and it is inevitable that the study volunteers would have realized what the researchers were looking for.
"Clearly at some point everyone realizes it must be about their racial bias and they feel they're being assessed. That is an additional factor that must be taken into account."
Others say brain activity like that seen in the study could indicate more than just racial prejudice.
"The effect the authors describe is really a subset of a much more general phenomenon, that of social distraction," says Professor Bob Turner, of University College London. "Consider the difficulty of remaining focused on a serious topic of discussion when one's interlocutor is a young, curvaceous blonde with a very low-cut dress." He said that comparison studies are needed with less politically loaded social distractions.
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