22- Intergroup Neuroscience Flashcards
1-Why Neuroscience and Intergroup Relations?
Timing
Not Just Localization
- The use of neuroscience methods within social psychology and intergroup
relations is not just for the purpose of localization.
- For example, categorizing racially ambiguous targets has been shown to
lead to greater activity in the dorsolateral anterior cingulate cortex. Why
would we care about?
Timing
- Neuroscientific methods can reveal the timing of various psychological
processes that is not possible using either self-report or even ‘implicit’ measures like the IAT.
- Even the IAT, or very fast self-report, still requires some time for completing
a behavioral response (e.g., pressing a computer key).
- Neuroscience approaches can then bypass these delays and reveal the true time course of various processes.
Timing: Refresher from Social Categorization
White participants passively viewed images of male and female Black and White people. Some categorized the images based on
gender, others categorized based on race. ERPs (event-related potentials) were also
tracked during the judgment process. ERPs revealed differences in processing of
race within 100 milliseconds and based on gender within 200 milliseconds.
What can we conclude from this neuroscience finding?
- Social categorization is fast and therefore likely automatic.
- Has larger implications for thinking about how such processes could or could not ever be consciously controlled.
- Social categorization may occur so quickly that finding a way to stop the process is unrealistic, better to focus on how to lessen any potentially negative implications of automatic categorization.
2- Why Neuroscience and Intergroup Relations? Connections Between Processes
- Aside from the benefit of more fine-grained information about timing, social neuroscience can use the larger literature in cognitive neuroscience to show connections between various psychological processes.
- This information can advance theory and lead to new insights into how such
processes operate.
Leveraging Cognitive Neuroscience Literature
neurosynth.org
(fMRI data)
- Let’s think again about the racial differences in the N200 component when using EEG analyses found in Ito and Urland (2003).
- The N200 has been associated in other work with response selection and
conflict processes because it originates in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.
- The typical finding of larger N200 response to ingroup targets in race categorization tasks may reflect RESPONSE CONFLICT associated with making an ingroup classification.
3- Why Neuroscience and Intergroup Relations?
Differences between processes
Just as intergroup neuroscience can show connections between different types of psychological processes, it can also be informative by taking the reverse approach.
How can neuroscience tease apart processes that appear to be similar?
- One study looked at differences in how the brain treats the process of
intergroup stereotypes versus intergroup prejudice. - On each trial, White participants saw two faces that were either both
Black, both White, or one Black and one White (though analyses only focused on the White-Black trials). - In some blocks, they made a stereotypical judgment (“Which person is
more athletic?”) and in other blocks they made a prejudicial judgment
(“Which person would you want to have as a friend?”). - After completing the forced-choice task in the fMRI scanner, participants then completed two IATs.
- One IAT was about attitudes: measuring the ease with which Black and White faces could be paired with positive versus
negative words. - The other IAT was about stereotypes: measuring the ease with which Black and White faces could be paired with words related to ‘mental’ (educated, smart, genius) versus words related to ‘physical’ (athletic, agile).
Results: - One brain region, the lateral orbitofrontal cortex DON’T NEED TO KNOW THE NAMES, was consistently more
activated during friendship trials than trait trials. - A different region, the anterior medial prefrontal cortex, was consistently
more activated during trait trials than friendship trials. - Follow-up analyses found that one brain region, the left temporal pole, was differentially associated with the two IAT scores depending on the judgment that participants were making.
- During ‘friendship’ trials, activation in the left temporal pole was more associated with evaluative IAT scores (good-bad).
- During ‘athletic’ trials, activation in the left temporal pole was more associated with stereotype IAT scores (mental-physical).
4- Why Neuroscience and Intergroup Relations?
Resolving debates
A final benefit to using neuroscience approaches is that it can be used as a
way of resolving competing predictions or perspectives that would not be able
to be resolved using other methods.
- Another study looked at a phenomenon they called “racial paralysis”, where people high in motivation to not appear prejudiced work hard to avoid cross-racial comparisons.
- The task was very similar to the previous study but with one key difference: participants were also given an option to indicate that they had “no gut feeling” and could opt out of making the judgment.
- In lab studies, participants were more likely to ”opt out” of trials involving faces of different races, particularly when making judgments related to stereotypical traits (intelligent, hardworking, etc.).
- But one open question from the lab-only studies is what drives this opt-out behavior. Is it about a lack of cross-race familiarity? Or is it more to do with efforts to regulate prejudice?
- An fMRI study where participants completed the same task found greater
activation in the DLPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) for cross-race over
same-race trials (even when participants ”opted out”). - But this was particularly true for when judgments were stereotype-relevant
(honest, intelligent, reliable) versus stereotype-irrelevant (curious, strict, have a brother).
About the brain region that was more active during cross-race and stereotypical judgments:
[This region] is implicated in self-conscious emotions that plays a central role in the regulation of behaviors and judgments governed by
strong social and moral norms… The implication of these regions in cross-race decisions offers support for our account that the fear of appearing biased evoked by such situations leads to conflict, greater reflection and a resulting tendency to opt out.
REVIEW THIS STUDY!! WATCH THE VIDEO CAUSE IDGI
- A final study looked at the more basic process by which people decide who is or is not a member of their own group.
- The researchers used a clever task to disentangle whether people rely
more on similarity or group structure when evaluating new people as potential group members.
- Participants first indicated their own belief about a number of policy
issues (e.g., support for the death penalty).
- They then learned about the policy beliefs for three other targets.
- They then had to align themselves with one of the targets by choosing to
side with them on an unknown policy position.
- Across conditions, the latent structure of people’s preferences made it
more or less easy to form a group with one of the targets (Target B).
- Results found that as the distractor (Target C) becomes more similar to the Participant/Target B, preferences for Target B increase
- This design can help tease apart “dyadic similarity” (all that matters is similarity to me, so A and B are equal) versus “latent structure” (using the behavior of others to infer a consensus or group structure).
- fMRI analyses found that greater use of this “latent structure” approach
was more strongly associated with activity in the right anterior insula.
- Other studies have found this same brain region to be key to more general structural learning tasks (non-social tasks), such as such as in processing components of a sentence in a reading task.
These results suggest that generalized group concepts rely on domaingeneral circuitry associated with latent structure learning and the encoding of stimuli’s functional significance.
These neuroscience findings then speak to some of the core issues that we have discussed in this class, such as the ‘cognitive perspective’ on stereotypes and prejudice. It seems like the way we think about other
people is highly similar to the way we think in general.
5- Future Directions for Intergroup Neuroscience
Intergroup neuroscience is still a relatively young field, and research on the
topic is increasing rapidly.
Just like non-neuroscience research in intergroup relations has benefitted
from new technologies and measures, new developments in neuroscience technology are leading to new possibilities for what can be studied from a neuroscientific perspective.
Example 1: Mobile Measurement
like a headcap thing used in fmris?? but connected to phone app and more discreet on head
Example 2: Inter-Brain Synchrony
like the previous one but measuring whole teams interactions
