A new study published by scientists at three California colleges confirmed people can't tell others of different races apart.

The controversial study called “Neural adaptation to faces reveals racial outgroup homogeneity effects in early perception” was conducted to prove if white people thought Black people looked alike. According to The Guardian, the study was intended to prove racial bias among all people. However, the 20 participants of the study were all white.

Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University and the University of California, Riverside conducted a series of tests. Participants were shown images including faces, numbers and objects. Each person's brain activity was then examined via an MRI.

The results were damning. Nineteen of the 20 participants showed signs of greater brain activity when they were shown an image of a white face compared to that of a Black face. Greater brain activity indicated they could tell the difference in a white person's face.

"Our results suggest that biases for other-race faces emerge at some of the earliest stages of sensory perception," the study read.

When the subjects were shown six Black and six white images of faces, the results suggest the participants could only see differences among the white faces. Each face was reportedly engineered to have a physical similarity ranging from them all being identical to completely different.

“What it tells us is that our tendency to see members of our own [racial] group as individuals and de-individuate members of other racial groups, that is something that happens on sight,” Nick Camp, the co-author of the research from Stanford University, told The Guardian.

In other experiments, the majority of the group of participants ranked images of Black faces as more similar.

There are many factors not considered in the study, though. The small sample size and the lack of diversity of the sample group affected the results. There was also an exclusion of information regarding the participants' close friends from different racial groups.

Essentially, the study only proved white people's racial bias.

Although the study has a number of drawbacks, the researchers are hopeful their findings can spark change.

Dr. Brent Hughes, a co-author of the paper from the University of California, Riverside, said the biases reported in the study were not fixed.

“Individuals should not be let off the hook for their prejudicial attitudes just because we see evidence of race biases in perception," he said. "To the contrary, these race biases in perception are malleable and subject to individual motivations and goals.”

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