Behavioral and neural evidence for an evaluative bias against other people's mundane interracial encounters.

Susanne Quadflieg,Thomas W Schubert,Yin Wang

doi:10.1093/scan/nsaa005

Abstract

Evaluating other people’s social encounters from a third-person perspective is an ubiquitous activity of daily life. Yet little is known about how these evaluations are affected by racial bias. To overcome this empirical lacuna, two experiments were conducted. The first experiment used evaluative priming to show that both Black (n = 44) and White Americans (n = 44) assess the same mundane encounters (e.g. two people chatting) less favorably when they involve a Black and a White individual rather than two Black or two White individuals. The second experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging to demonstrate that both Black (n = 46) and White Americans (n = 42) respond with reduced social reward processing (i.e. lower activity in the ventral striatum) and enhanced mentalizing (e.g. higher activity in the bilateral temporal–parietal junction) toward so-called cross-race relative to same-race encounters. By combining unobtrusive measures from social psychology and social neuroscience, this work demonstrates that racial bias can affect impression formation even at the level of the dyad.

Highlights

Humans frequently draw intricate conclusions about other people’s social encounters and relations without directly getting to know them
A mere glance at two people’s non-verbal exchanges can suffice, for instance, to judge their degree of familiarity and rapport (e.g. Sekerdej et al, 2018; see Quadflieg and Penton-Voak, 2017 for a review). These so-called relational first impressions often rely on well-known networks of the social brain and inform the spontaneous approval or disapproval of other people’s social conduct (e.g. Skinner and Hudac, 2017; Milinski 2016)
Participants’ mean response times on valid trials were submitted to a 2 × 2 × 2 mixed measures analysis of variance (ANOVA; see Figure 1C). Please note that this analysis compared all same-race encounters (i.e. Black-on-Black encounters (BBE), White-on-White encounters (WWE)) and all cross-race encounters (i.e. Black-on-White encounters (BWE), White-onBlack encounters (WBE)), so that the exact same Black and White individuals featured in both experimental conditions

Summary

Introduction

Humans frequently draw intricate conclusions about other people’s social encounters and relations without directly getting to know them. Sekerdej et al, 2018; see Quadflieg and Penton-Voak, 2017 for a review). These so-called relational first impressions often rely on well-known networks of the social brain (such as the person perception network and the mentalizing network; see Quadflieg and Koldewyn, 2017 for a review) and inform the spontaneous approval or disapproval of other people’s social conduct Alas, accumulating evidence suggests that perceivers’ rapid relational impressions of other people’s social encounters are not always accurate (Gray, 2008). Bernieri et al, 1996; Aloni and Bernieri, 2004) Despite this realization, little is known about psychological and neural sources of inaccuracy in relational impression formation. That the rapid evaluation of other people’s encounters can be affected

Methods

Results

Conclusion