Class 21 Flashcards
Why link neuroscience and intergroup relations?
(when neuroscience tends to be SUPER expensive)
What is NOT the goal of neuroscience?
Not just “what part of the brain lights up here”
Not just localization
What IS neuroscience research about?
categorizing racially ambiguous targets has been shown to lead to greater activity in the dorsolateral anterior cingulate cortex. Why would we care about that?
- Connecting info like this to connect it more broadly to what we know about the brain
- And connect to intergroup relations
How does Neuroscience work with timing?
Looks at how your brain works between responses
Ex. 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
Explain how timing was studied on the social categorization of gender and race?
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
(we process race a little faster then gender)
Explain how timing was studied on the social categorization of gender and race?
What is the TAKEAWAY?
You can see evidence people are paying attention to these social identities extremely quickly
It take 500 milliseconds to produce a behaviour
(so these 500 milliseconds would be a black box if you don’t use neuroscience)
Explain how timing was studied on the social categorization of gender and race?
What can we conclude from this neuroscience finding? (3 things)
- 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
How else can we use neruoscience?
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
ex. Put ppl in brainscans and do reading, memory tasks, long term memory
- If you do intergroup relations tasks, and similar areas are lighting up, you can infer there is a shared underlying process
Example: Leveraging Cognitive Neuroscience Literature
What is Neruosynth.org
Can type in a brain area and it tells you all other tasks / studies that elicit brain activity in the same area
When detecting white / black targets, we see differences in the N200 component when using EEG analyses.
Where else do we see N200 component?
You also see N200 in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex with categorization generally (ex. is this a duck)
(response selection and conflict processes)
Ppl take their ability to categorize non social objects and bring it over to the task where they categorize white and black faces
Might reflect response conflict
What is response conflict?
You aren’t sure the correct category decision, and you have to actively pay attention to resolve the conflict
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?”)
Findings of study:
(One study looked at differences in how the brain treats the process of intergroup stereotypes versus intergroup prejudice)
Stereotypical judgements used diff brain areas then prejudicial judgements
What happened in this study’s part 2: IAT
(One study looked at differences in how the brain treats the process of intergroup stereotypes versus intergroup prejudice)
- 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)
What happened in this study’s part 2: IAT
FINDINGS
- One brain region, (the lateral orbitofrontal cortex), was consistently more
activated during friendship trials than trait trials.- Trials that were about prejudice were more in this one)
- A different region, (the anterior medial prefrontal cortex), was consistently
more activated during trait trials than friendship trials- More activated with stereotypes then with prejudice
What is prejudice?
Associations with positivity or negativity
What are stereotypes?
Associations with a construct / stereotype
(ex. hard working)
How did the left temporal pole show up on IATs?
differentially associated with the two IAT scores depending on the
judgment that participants were making.
- During ‘friendship’ (prejudice) trials, activation in the left temporal pole was more associated with evaluative IAT scores (good-bad).
(the more u used it the more they could correlate it with ur score)
- During ‘athletic’ (stereotype) trials, activation in the left temporal pole was more associated with stereotype IAT scores (mental-physical).
This brain area might be important to use these associations to give judgement.
- Guides ur associations to make this decision
(ITS FLEXIBLE TO HELP U MAKE DIFF CHOICES) (DOMAIN GENERAL) (APPLY ASSOCIATIONS TO CURRENT JUDEGMENT)
A final benefit to using neuroscience approaches is that it can…
- Get around social desirability concerns
- it can be used as a way of resolving competing predictions or perspectives that would not be able to be resolved using other methods
What is phenomenon they called “racial paralysis”?
where people high in motivation to not appear prejudiced work hard to avoid cross-racial comparisons
(work hard to make sure you don’t make judgment / evaluation that suggests prejudice)
What methods did they use to study “racial paralysis”?
What did they find?
Same options as previous study (friend vs who’s athletic)
participants were also given an option to indicate that they had “no gut feeling” and could opt out of making the judgment
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.)
What is the question that remains from the opt out study?
what drives this opt-out behavior. Is it about a lack of cross-race familiarity (don’t have cross race friends) (ignorance)? Or is it more to do with efforts to regulate prejudice?
Why is it hard to ask participants straight up why they did something?
They might lie to you or themselves about reasons behind their behaviour
How was neuroscience used to resolve debates? ( phenomenon they called “racial paralysis” & Opting Out)
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 traits
(honest, intelligent, reliable) versus stereotype-irrelevant traits (curious, strict,
have a brother)
What is the implication of the activation of DLPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) for cross-race trials only?
This region is implicated in self-conscious emotions (and regulation of behaviors and judgments governed by strong social and moral norms)
Suggests: the fear of appearing biased evoked by such situations leads to conflict, greater reflection and a resulting tendency to opt out
Resolving Debates:
What was the study?
(STUDY: more basic process by which people decide who is or is not a member of their own group)
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
- (who do you think will be most similar to you on this unknown policy)
What did they find?
(STUDY: more basic process by which people decide who is or is not a member of their own group)
You are participant P
One condition:
- Choose between A or B (same distance away)
- C is close to your beliefs
Second condition:
- Choose between A or B (same distance away)
- C is far from you
Should be coinflip if you pick A or B
She found:
If you put C close to you and B, it makes it easier to form a group (with u, C and B)
If you put C further away and by B, easier to pick A (B doesn’t look similar to u anymore)
How does the A, B, and C study help tease apart “dyadic similarity” versus “latent structure”?
“dyadic similarity” (all that matters is
similarity to me, so A and B are equal)
(base rate)
versus
“latent structure” (using the behavior of others to infer a consensus or group structure)
(subjective interpretation)
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
What does the right anterior insula and it’s study suggest?
suggest that generalized group concepts rely on domain- general circuitry associated with latent structure learning and the encoding of stimuli’s functional significance
(how relevant is this to me)
It seems like the way we think about other
people is highly similar to the way we think in general
These neuroscience findings support some of the basic stuff we went over in the first couple of weeks (ex. Allport: contact theory + social cognitive perspective)
What is the social cognitive perspective?
Pushing away that prejudice / stereotypes are results of bad apples
Basic building blocks of mind (reading) is the same for social tasks (stereotypes)
- Not special processes in brain (stereotype’s are just apart of how brain functions
Future Directions for Intergroup Neuroscience? (new: 30 years ish)
- Mobile Measurement
- Inter-Brain Synchrony
- Mobile Measurement
(old) Eeg cap while see other races pop up on computer screen (and make judgements)
(now can do mobile - with ur phone, see ppl IRL, still same dumb hat tho) - Inter-Brain Synchrony
Many ppl in study together, track brain waves as they do task (working / negotiating with each other)
- Track how similarly their brains are interpreting the world around them
- Use this to predict if the group will get along or not
Example of Inter-Brain Synchrony?
Study found that inter-brain synchrony in teams will predict collective performance
