The Social Neuroscience of Prejudice

Abstract

The social neuroscience approach to prejudice investigates the psychology of intergroup bias by integrating models and methods of neuroscience with the social psychology of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. Here, we review major contemporary lines of inquiry, including current accounts of group-based categorization; formation and updating of prejudice and stereotypes; effects of prejudice on perception, emotion, and decision making; and the self-regulation of prejudice. In each section, we discuss key social neuroscience findings, consider interpretational challenges and connections with the behavioral literature, and highlight how they advance psychological theories of prejudice. We conclude by discussing the next-generation questions that will continue to guide the social neuroscience approach toward addressing major societal issues of prejudice and discrimination. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 72 is January 4, 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Establishing a Role of the Semantic Control Network in Social Cognitive Processing: A Meta-analysis of Functional Neuroimaging Studies

“…Although many contemporary theories of social cognition acknowledge the 7 importance of control, or regulatory processes (Adolphs, 2010;Amodio and Cikara, 2021;7 Frith and Frith, 2012), many key questions remain about their exact nature and neural 7 underpinnings. These include a) whether multiple forms of cognitive control contribute to 7 social cognition, b) whether these mechanisms are best understood in terms of domain-7 general processes or systems specialised for social information processing and, c) whether 7 they are ubiquitously involved or selectively engaged according to certain task demands 7 (Binney and Ramsey, 2020).…”

“…Likewise, Frith and Frith (2012) refer to a "supervisory system" which has the characteristic features of executive control, but its functional and anatomical descriptions lack detail important for generating testable hypotheses. However, research into specific social phenomena, such as prejudice (Amodio, 2014;Amodio and Cikara, 2021) and automatic imitation (Cross et al, 2013;Darda and Ramsey, 2019) has recently begun to give the matter of cognitive control greater attention. Of particular interest has been the contribution of the domain-general multipledemand network (MDN), a set of brain areas engaged by cognitively-challenging tasks irrespective of the cognitive domain (Assem et al, 2020;Duncan, 2010;Fedorenko et al, 2013;Hugdahl et al, 2015).…”

“…This follows a broader claim that social cognition and its neural correlates can be understood as a nuanced form of semantic cognition which itself is defined as a set of processes involved in extracting meaning from the environment and using it to guide purposeful and context-appropriate behaviour (Binney and Ramsey, 2020;Lambon Ralph et al, 2017). This framework contrasts with approaches that look upon social processing as a distinct or even special case of cognition (i.e., domain-specific models; Barrett, 2012;Saxe, 2006; but also see Amodio, 2019;Amodio and Cikara, 2021;Schaafsma et al, 2015;Spunt and Adolphs, 2017) and, instead, posits that it is underpinned by two, more domain-general neurocognitive systems. The first system is representational in nature and supports the acquisition and long-term storage of conceptual-level knowledge about objects, people, abstract concepts, and events.…”

Neural representations of others’ traits predict social decisions

“…For example, it is possible that the context-specific effects of social perception on behavior (warmth affects advantageous inequity aversion, while competence affects disadvantageous inequity aversion) could be mediated by flexible readout of the OFC signals by downstream regions 65 . Second, it remains an open question how trait representations in the mentalizing network and the OFC are constructed from semantic knowledge about social groups, possibly represented in the anterior temporal lobe [66][67][68] . Third, while we did not find evidence of trait representations in the hippocampus, a previous study reported that self-other relationships in a twodimensional ego-centric space is represented in the hippocampus 69 .…”

Differences in Explicit Stereotype Activation among Social Groups Based on the Stereotype Content Model: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence in Chinese Sample

“…Starting in the 1980s, researchers adapted response time paradigms to study stereotype activation (e.g., [ 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 ]). More recently, various neuroscience techniques have been used to further elucidate the cognitive processes involved in stereotype activation (see reviews [ 7 , 8 , 9 ]). This line of research has revealed a great deal about stereotype activation and the conditions under which it occurs (for review, see [ 10 ]), but the vast majority has focused on only one or two social groups (e.g., racial groups, gender groups).…”