Testing the impact and malleability of neural biases in outgroup deindividuation

University Of California-Riverside, Riverside CA

Investigators

Abstract

People tend to see members of their own racial groups as individuals but consider members of other racial groups as interchangeable and indistinct, a phenomenon known as deindividuation. Deindividuation facilitates group-based discrimination and increases social inequality. For example, White eyewitnesses misidentify Black individuals as perpetrators at a much higher rate than White, which results in a larger proportion of wrongful convictions among Black individuals. This research tests the limits and malleability of how low-level perceptual and neurocognitive mechanisms habituate more quickly to other-race individuals as repeated instances of the same broad category, but habituate less to own-race targets, leading to better identification for ingroup members. In particular, this research tests these processes across different affective states to test how fear influences face identification processes. It also tests how threat and affiliation cues influence identification processes. Understanding how the brain “sees” racial outgroup members is important to help mitigate race-based disparities and outcomes in the United States. This research uses behavioral, physiological and neuroimaging experiments to examine the consequences of perceptual biases involved in person perception processes. Research shows that there is coarser neural tuning of face selective processing for outgroup faces compared to ingroup faces. This results in poorer recognition for racial outgroups than ingroups. This research tests these perceptual biases, their flexibility, and whether they can be eliminated. One series of studies examines whether deindividuating racial outgroup members in perception can lead people to generalize fear across a wide range of outgroup members. Specifically, this research tests the degree to which experiencing an aversive event paired with one outgroup member elicits a similar fear response to other individuals who look more or less similar to that target. Another series of studies examines the extent to which the brain habituates to groups of Black or White faces, testing whether biases in perception are fixed, or flexible depending on emotion or superordinate group membership. A final study combines these approaches to test whether interventions that combat group biases can prevent the spread of fear across outgroup members. This research has direct relevance for the formation of prejudice and discrimination, and can eventually address eye-witness processes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.