The Neuroscience of Intergroup Relations

Global Perspectives on the Neural Underpinnings of Intergroup Behaviour, Ingroup Bias and Prejudice

Pascal Molenberghs, Pascal Molenberghs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000541656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This path-breaking book is the first collection to provide a scientific global overview on the social neuroscience of intergroup relations, and the neural mechanisms that drive processes such as prejudice, racism and dehumanisation.

Although intergroup behaviour has long been an important topic in psychology, attention to the underlying neural processes that influence it has often been neglected. If we truly want to understand the driving forces of social behaviours such as racism, bias and violence between groups, it is essential that we better understand the neuroscience behind these processes. Providing critical insights on these underpinnings, topics covered in the book include the neuroscience of ingroup bias, empathy, dehumanisation, competition, ideological bias and prejudice between groups. As well as explaining how genes and environment interact to create attitudes between groups and how this can lead to different cultures, later chapters also give practical solutions on how to reduce ingroup bias and support prosocial behaviour between groups through better neuroscientific understanding.

Featuring contributions from world-leading experts, this is fascinating reading for students and researchers in social psychology and neuroscience, and is ideal for anyone examining intergroup relations from a social neuroscientific perspective, or using social neuroscience methods for the first time.

1 The neural underpinnings of intergroup bias

David M. Amodio and Jeffrey J. Berg

DOI: 10.4324/9781003042426-1

How can neuroscience – the study of neural processes – help us to understand the complex social phenomenon of intergroup bias? Historically, group-based biases have been understood in terms of systemic- and individual-level factors. At the system level, intergroup bias is instantiated in social hierarchies and power structures that promote and maintain group disparities. At the individual level, intergroup bias may manifest in a person's stereotypic beliefs, negative attitudes and affective responses and discriminative actions, and may be expressed collectively in large-scale patterns of discrimination and campaigns of oppression. Moreover, these two aspects of intergroup bias – systemic and individual – can interact in a cyclical manner, whereby systemic disparities are mediated by individual biases, which in turn guide discriminatory actions that reinforce existing disparities.

Although intergroup bias is typically understood in terms of these psychological and sociological processes, research on the neural underpinnings of intergroup bias has begun to shed light on their underlying cognitive and affective processes, offering insight into the specific ways that intergroup bias is experienced and expressed among individuals (Amodio, 2014; Molenberghs, 2013). Recent advances in social neuroscience have also begun to address how individual minds interact with broader elements of their social system, suggesting that social neuroscience can also offer insight into broader psychosocial mechanisms of intergroup bias.

In this chapter, we present a social neuroscience model of the processes through which intergroup bias is learned, mentally represented and expressed in behaviour. We begin by describing the memory systems model of intergroup bias (Amodio & Ratner, 2011; see also Amodio, 2019), which applies research on learning and memory established in cognitive neuroscience to the social phenomenon of intergroup bias, and discuss its implications for how intergroup bias operates at the individual level, as well as how individual-level biases may interface with social systems.

A memory systems model of intergroup bias

Psychological models of intergroup bias and social cognition have traditionally assumed that we learn about people and groups in one particular way: through the formation of conceptual knowledge associations that are represented in a single, broad semantic network. This assumption underlies influential dual-process models of prejudice and stereotyping, and it continues to guide much thinking on how intergroup bias is formed, expressed and potentially reduced via intervention (see Amodio, 2019, for a review). However, this view is quite different from models developed in cognitive neuroscience, which identify multiple forms of learning and memory. These memory systems are distinguished by their neural substrates, the kinds of information encoded (e.g., conceptual or reward-based), their mode of updating and their expression in judgment and behaviour (Poldrack & Foerde, 2008; Squire & Zola, 1996).

We have argued that a consideration of memory systems is crucial to our understanding of intergroup bias because it suggests that multiple kinds of information are encoded, beyond semantic knowledge, and that these different kinds of information are expressed in different channels of intergroup social behaviour (Amodio, 2019; Amodio & Berg, 2018; Amodio & Ratner, 2011). These systems include memory processes addressed in traditional stereotyping and prejudice research, such as semantic (or conceptual) knowledge and associations, as well as others that have only recently been applied to human social cognition and prejudice, such as Pavlovian and instrumental learning. A sample of these learning and memory systems is shown in Figure 1.1, along with their respective neural substrates and putative channels of expression. In this section, we describe advances in our understanding of how intergroup bias is learned and represented in the mind, based on contemporary neuroscientific models of learning and memory, and discuss their implications for how biases may be activated and expressed in behaviour.

Figure 1.1 A model of the learning and memory systems through which different forms of intergroup bias are acquired and represented, illustrating their putative neural substrates and examples of their respective intergroup outcomes. Adapted from Amodio (2019).

Stereotypes and conceptual evaluations: the role of semantic memory

Stereotypes represent the conceptual attributes linked to a group, including characterisations of a group's social status and economic standing (e.g., wealthy or poor) and the traits of its members (e.g., smart or hostile). The particular content of a group stereotype may vary between cultures or societies, but what they share in common is a basis in conceptual, or semantic, memory. As such, the process of stereotyping involves the encoding and storage of group-based concepts, the selection and activation of these concepts into working memory, and their application in judgments and behaviours (Fiske, 1998).

In the brain, the process of stereotyping is assumed to involve the same cortical structures that support general forms of semantic memory, including object memory, retrieval and conceptual activation, such as the temporal lobes and inferior frontal regions (Ralph et al., 2017). Social knowledge, about both people and groups, has been specifically linked to the anterior temporal lobe (ATL), including the temporal pole (e.g., Olson et al., 2013; Zahn et al., 2007). Hence, stereotypes and evaluative (i.e., good/bad) conceptual associations – to the extent they represent a social form of semantic processing – should also be associated with activity in these regions.

To date, fMRI studies of stereotyping have largely supported this view. Gilbert et al. (2012) examined neural activity while participants judged Black and White faces according to either a stereotype (athleticism) or an evaluation (potential friendship). To probe stored representations of stereotypes and evaluations, the authors employed multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA), which detects spatial patterns of neural activity in fMRI data that differentiate between experimental conditions. Using MVPA, the authors looked for patterns of neural activity during racial judgments of stereotype traits, as opposed to evaluations, that corresponded with participants’ scores on separate implicit association tests (IATs) of racial stereotyping and evaluation, respectively. The authors found one region in which activity corresponded to both implicitly measured stereotyping and implicitly measured evaluation and correlated, respectively, with the strength of participants’ stereotyping and evaluative associations: the ATL. That is, when subjects made trait judgements, stereotyping IAT scores were associated with a pattern of ATL activity that predicted racial differences in stereotype use; when participants made evaluative judgements, evaluative IAT scores were associated with a different pattern of ATL activity that predicted racial differences in friendship judgments. These findings identified a semantic memory basis for stereotyping, as well as for conceptual evaluative associations, in the ATL.

Consistent with an ATL substrate of stereotype representation, Spiers et al. (2017) observed that the formation of racial stereotypes, acquired as participants read descriptions of outgroup members’ negative behaviours, was tracked uniquely by activity in the temporal poles. In other research, disruption of ATL activity via transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) attenuated gender stereotype associations on an implicit task (Gallate et al., 2011). Furthermore, event-related potential (ERP) studies have linked stereotype processing to the N400 ERP component (White et al., 2009), a neural signal originating from the temporal lobe that is associated with language and semantic memory processes and occurs ~400 milliseconds following word presentation (Bartholow & Amodio, 2009).

Whereas semantic information about groups, including stereotypes and conceptual evaluations, are stored in the ATL, research suggests that this information is activated and represented in the mPFC (medial prefrontal cortex) when making relevant social judgments (Amodio, 2014). This effect is supported by anatomical connectivity between the ATL and mPFC (de Schotten et al., 2012), and further consistent with the role of the mPFC in representing trait information about individuals during social judgment tasks (Amodio & Frith, 2006; Mitchell et al., 2002) and in stereotypic judgments of gender (Contreras et al., 2012; Quadflieg et al., 2009). In line with this model, Gilbert et al. (2012) found that the application of stereotypes to Black, as opposed to White, target individuals was predicted by patterns of neural activity in the mPFC. By contrast, evaluative judgments of Black, compared with White, target individuals were predicted by neural patterns in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a region that also receives strong input from the ATL but is typically involved in evaluative decision-making (O’Doherty et al., 2017).

In summary, the neural basis of stereotyping remains understudied relative to work on prejudiced attitudes and emotion, yet existing research consistently identifies the ATL as supporting the representation of group stereotypes and conceptual evaluative associations. Both kinds of associations may reflect semantic knowledge, and their basis in the ATL is consistent with the broader role of this region in supporting semantic memory. During the process of intergroup decision-making, stereotype knowledge in the ATL is activated and represented in the mPFC, where it guides social judgments.

An affective basis of prejudice? The role of Pavlovian aversive conditioning

Prejudice is often experienced as an affective state, characterised by feelings of fear, threat or disgust, and this response may occur independently of the semantic associations that characterise stereotypes or conceptual evaluations. Social n...