Social Cognitive Neuroscience of Social Groups

Ohio State University Research Foundation -Do Not Use, Columbus OH

Investigators

Abstract

The psychological study of prejudice (and its reduction) has been at the forefront of social psychology for over a half century. Recently, research in social psychology has been extended by work in cognitive neuroscience that has provided some evidence of the ways in which the brain processes information about social groups. Excitement surrounding this neuroscientific approach has led to an explosion of research findings and has already been used to inform legal decision making. Yet, this research is still relatively new and often times raises nearly as many questions as it answers in mapping brain, process, and behavior if only because knowledge of brain structure and function in these contexts is still somewhat unclear. For example, although regions such as the amygdala have been implicated in certain aspects of social bias, and areas of frontal cortex have been implicated in the correction of these biases, the precise role that these regions play in social bias is still relatively unknown. To help resolve these questions, three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies are proposed to examine the neural processes that underlie two intertwined mechanisms for prejudice. The first is the learned prejudices that give rise to evaluations of social groups. The second is the preferences that develop out of the categorization of people into ingroups (e.g., "us") and outgroups (e.g., "them") in the absence of any particular knowledge or attitude structures. In each study, participants will be randomly assigned to a group that has both Black and White members and will be presented with these faces (along with new Black and White faces) during fMRI scanning. The advantage of using novel groups in conjunction with pre-existing groups is that this allows us to compare the processing of people from novel groups (for which people have no learned evaluations) to the processing of people from groups where there are learned evaluations. These studies will help yield a better understanding of the basic cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in group perception and evaluation - core aspects of human social cognition. In addition, this approach to group processing and social prejudice will advance scientific theory and train graduate and undergraduate students in social psychology and neuroscience (in particular, neuroimaging). More broadly, this research will highlight the flexible aspects of intergroup biases and provide policy makers with possible methods for reducing intergroup (e.g., racial) biases.