The neural underpinnings of intergroup social cognition: an fMRI meta-analysis

Abstract

Roughly twenty years of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have investigated the neural correlates underlying engagement in social cognition (e.g., empathy, emotion perception) about targets spanning various social categories (e.g., race, gender). Yet findings from individual studies remain mixed. In the present quantitative functional neuroimaging meta-analysis, we summarized across 50 fMRI studies of social cognition to identify consistent differences in neural activation as a function of whether the target of social cognition was an ingroup or outgroup member. We investigated if such differences varied according to social category (i.e., race) and social cognitive process (i.e., empathy, emotion perception). We found that social cognition about ingroup members was more reliably related to activity in brain regions associated with mentalizing (e.g., dmPFC), whereas social cognition about outgroup members was more reliably related to activity in regions associated with exogenous attention and salience (e.g., anterior insula). These findings replicated for studies specifically focused on the social category of race, and we further found intergroup differences in neural activation during empathy and emotion perception tasks. These results help shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition across group lines.

Community-level racial prejudice potentiates Whites’ neural responses to out-group faces: A spatial meta-analytic approach

“…Article Selection. We compiled all papers from a review by Kubota et al (2) as well as papers categorized as "race" from a meta-analysis on the neural underpinnings of intergroup social cognition (11). We included three additional papers that did not appear in either review, for a total of 22 studies (Table 1).…”

“…We used the 20 indicators of aggregated explicit racial attitudes that have loaded highly in unidimensional factor models for state-level racism in a prior pre-registered analysis (12) to generate model-based factor scores of community-level racial prejudice (Table 1) for each county (N=1,829 in Project Implicit). We aggregated all responses to the county level irrespective of year queried, consistent with other studies (11,12).…”

Prefrontal contributions to the stability and variability of thought and conscious experience

“…2), which is most often discussed in terms of its recruitment during abstract sociocognitive processes. This includes visual perspective taking [254,255], evaluating why versus how someone performed a behavior [256,257], differentiating in-group versus out-group individuals [258], maintaining knowledge of psychological traits [170,259,260] and social stereotypes [261], and forming impressions of others [262,263]. However, the dMPFC is also linked to abstract non-social processes: It exhibits greater activation during the formation of high-construal relative to low-construal categories for both social and non-social stimuli [247,249].…”

The effect of action contingency on social perception is independent of person-like appearance and is related to deactivation of the frontal component of the self-agency network

“…Finally, activation of these regions reflects social perception, which is important for group membership. A recent meta-analysis reported reduced activation of these regions for in-group members compared with out-group members 49 ; importantly, this reduced activation was limited to the frontal regions. In this context, our findings imply that the frontal component is involved in processes in which the influence of contingency related to others’ actions during contact contributes to subsequent social perception.…”