The neuroscience of prejudice and stereotyping

Amodio, David M.

doi:10.1038/nrn3800

Cited by 399 publications

(323 citation statements)

References 159 publications

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“…The amygdala is typically activated during events high in emotional salience or novelty and may direct atention to motivationally relevant stimuli [59]. We thus argued that heightened amygdala activation toward same-race individuals in pain relects approachrelated motivation and atention in line with task demands, which urged participants to empathize with individuals in distress [39].…”

Section: Intergroup Empathy Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An important aspect of intergroup bias is the fact that it appears to depend heavily on the perceiver's social motivation: various studies have shown that self-categorization broadly along some ingroup/outgroup distinction is lexible and that re-categorization with an arbitrarily deined group may be suicient to override automatic response biases [39]. In these studies, participants are typically assigned to novel groups using a minimal group paradigm [40] and then subjected to a variety of tasks assessing perceptual, afective, and behavioral ingroup biases [41][42][43][44].…”

Section: Intergroup Empathy Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Less Attractive Feature of Empathy: Intergroup Empathy Bias

Fourie¹,

Subramoney²,

Gobodo-Madikizela³

2017

Empathy - An Evidence-Based Interdisciplinary Perspective

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Empathy with others' successes and misfortunes is a critical component of group living that promotes social cohesion. Unfortunately, empathy is a malleable phenomenon in that its elicitation is not automatic, but modulated by multiple interlocking factors. This chapter explores the speciic phenomenon of intergroup empathy bias-the diference in empathy for members of social ingroups versus outgroups-which poses profound challenges for our modern human world characterized by a multitude of groups, ethnicities, and cultures. The chapter frames the discussion by contextualizing empathy as consisting of three interacting component processes, namely experience sharing, perspective taking, and empathic concern. It then goes on to examine research describing the efects of intergroup bias on each of these component processes. Next, it explores the factors, both at the level of the group and at the level of the individual, which may contribute to empathic breakdown in intergroup contexts. Finally, it considers strategies that may have potential in mitigating intergroup empathy bias. Here, we draw on our own experiences in the South African context, which is characterized by pervasive racial inequality and legacies of apartheid violence, to suggest that intergroup empathy is best stimulated in a context of reciprocal mutual engagement with the other.

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Section: Intergroup Empathy Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Intergroup Empathy Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Less Attractive Feature of Empathy: Intergroup Empathy Bias

Fourie¹,

Subramoney²,

Gobodo-Madikizela³

2017

Empathy - An Evidence-Based Interdisciplinary Perspective

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“…The final source of evidence for the importance of the conceptual self to research on prejudice comes from neuroimaging studies of the brain basis of prejudice that highlight an important role for two key self-related areas, the vmPFC and the AI (Amodio, 2014). As discussed above, the vmPFC is heavily implicated in the representation of the conceptual self.…”

Section: Prejudice and The Conceptual Selfmentioning

confidence: 99%

Putting Ourselves in Another’s Skin: Using the Plasticity of Self-Perception to Enhance Empathy and Decrease Prejudice

Farmer

Maister

2017

Soc Just Res

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The self is one the most important concepts in social cognition and plays a crucial role in determining questions such as which social groups we view ourselves as belonging to and how we relate to others. In the past decade, the self has also become an important topic within cognitive neuroscience with an explosion in the number of studies seeking to understand how different aspects of the self are represented within the brain. In this paper, we first outline the recent research on the neurocognitive basis of the self and highlight a key distinction between two forms of self-representation. The first is the ''bodily'' self, which is thought to be the basis of subjective experience and is grounded in the processing of sensorimotor signals. The second is the ''conceptual'' self, which develops through our interactions of other and is formed of a rich network of associative and semantic information. We then investigate how both the bodily and conceptual self are related to social cognition with an emphasis on how self-representations are involved in the processing and creation of prejudice. We then highlight new research demonstrating that the bodily and conceptual self are both malleable and that this malleability can be harnessed in order to achieve a reduction in social prejudice. In particular, we will outline strong evidence that modulating people's perceptions of the bodily self can lead to changes in attitudes at the conceptual level. We will highlight a series of studies demonstrating that social attitudes towards various social out-groups (e.g. racial groups) can lead to a reduction in prejudice towards that group. Finally, we seek to place these findings in a broader social context by considering how innovations in virtual reality technology can allow experiences of taking on another's identity are likely to become both more commonplace and more convincing in the future and the various opportunities and risks associated with using such technology to reduce prejudice.

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“…Existing literature suggests that this effect occurs for two basic reasons. The first is as part of humans' coalition detection system (Amodio, 2014;Boyer, Firat, & van Leeuwen, 2015;Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2001). According to this research, people have an evolved capacity for identifying friends and foes.…”

Section: Attitudinal Dissimilarity Prejudices and The Illusion Of Ementioning

confidence: 99%

I know that I know nothing: Can puncturing the illusion of explanatory depth overcome the relationship between attitudinal dissimilarity and prejudice?

Voelkel

Brandt

Colombo

2018

Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology

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I know that I know nothingVoelkel, J.G.; Brandt, Mark; Colombo, Matteo General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.-Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research -You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain -You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright, please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. People are prejudiced toward groups they perceive as having a worldview dissimilar from their own. This link between perceived attitudinal dissimilarity and prejudice is so stable that it has been described as a psychological law. The current research tests whether reducing people's (over-)confidence in their own understanding of policies by puncturing their illusion of explanatory depth in the political domain will reduce the link between perceived attitudinal dissimilarity and prejudice. In an initial pre-registered experiment (N = 296), we did not find support for our hypothesis, but exploratory analyses indicated that the hypothesized effect occurred for political moderates (but not for people who identified as strong liberals/conservatives). However, despite successfully manipulating people's understanding of policies, in the main study (N = 492) we did not replicate the result of the initial experiment. We suggest potential explanations for our results and discuss future directions for research on breaking the link between attitudinal dissimilarity and prejudice.ARTICLE HISTORY

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The neuroscience of prejudice and stereotyping

Cited by 399 publications

References 159 publications

A Less Attractive Feature of Empathy: Intergroup Empathy Bias

A Less Attractive Feature of Empathy: Intergroup Empathy Bias

Putting Ourselves in Another’s Skin: Using the Plasticity of Self-Perception to Enhance Empathy and Decrease Prejudice

I know that I know nothing: Can puncturing the illusion of explanatory depth overcome the relationship between attitudinal dissimilarity and prejudice?

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