Abstract
Human faces automatically attract visual attention and this process appears to be guided by social group memberships. In two experiments, we examined how social groups guide selective attention toward in-group and out-group faces. Black and White participants detected a target letter among letter strings superimposed on faces (Experiment 1). White participants were less accurate on trials with racial out-group (Black) compared to in-group (White) distractor faces. Likewise, Black participants were less accurate on trials with racial out-group (White) compared to in-group (Black) distractor faces. However, this pattern of out-group bias was only evident under high perceptual load—when the task was visually difficult. To examine the malleability of this pattern of racial bias, a separate sample of participants were assigned to mixed-race minimal groups (Experiment 2). Participants assigned to groups were less accurate on trials with their minimal in-group members compared to minimal out-group distractor faces, regardless of race. Again, this pattern of out-group bias was only evident under high perceptual load. Taken together, these results suggest that social identity guides selective attention toward motivationally relevant social groups—shifting from out-group bias in the domain of race to in-group bias in the domain of minimal groups—when perceptual resources are scarce.
Highlights
The human brain is “truly social,” which is to say specialized for group living [1, 2]
Racial out-group face distractors may capture one’s attention and lead to greater distractor interference under high load when perceptual resources are limited. These results suggest that racial out-group faces may have produced greater interference effects under high load when cognitive sources were scarce to inhibit attention to racial out-group distractor faces
There was no evidence that participants were more distracted by racial out-group compared to in-group distractor faces under low perceptual load, when participants had more perceptual resources available to control their attention
Summary
The human brain is “truly social,” which is to say specialized for group living [1, 2]. Living in groups confers numerous benefits, including the fulfillment of many basic psychological needs [3,4,5,6]. The value humans place on group membership is illustrated by the fact that people form groups in every culture on earth [7] and readily form groups under the most trivial of circumstances [8]. Group Membership and Perceptual Load including the value or significance of this group and the relationship and associations that they share with the group and its members—known as social identification [9, 10]. We examined when and how social identity impacts one’s capacity of controlling selective attention, critical for goal-directed behavior
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