Abstract
Previous research has shown that people have more empathic responses to in-group members and more schadenfreude to out-group members. As a dimension of cognitive empathy, perspective-taking has been considered to be related to the enhancement of empathy. We tried to combine these effects through manipulation of a competitive task with opponents and an in-group partner and investigated the potential effect of in-group bias or the perspective-taking effect on outcome evaluation. We hypothesized that the neural activities would provide evidence of in-group bias. We tested it with a simple gambling observation task and recorded subjects’ electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. Our results showed that the opponent’s loss evoked larger feedback-related negativity (FRN) and smaller P300 activity than the partner’s loss condition, and there was a win vs. loss differential effect in P300 for the opponent only. The principal component analysis (PCA) replicated the loss vs. win P300 effect to opponent’s performance. Moreover, the correlation between the inclusion of the other in the self (IOS) scores and FRN suggests perspective-taking may induce greater monitoring to opponent’s performance, which increases the win vs. loss differentiation brain response to the out-group agent. Our results thus provide evidence for the enhanced attention toward out-group individuals after competition manipulation, as well as the motivation significance account of FRN.
Highlights
As an important aspect of self-representation in social life, the in-group bias refers to the behavioral pattern of people more favoring in-group members than out-group members, which has been widely explored from both developmental and evolutionary views (Brewer, 1979; Struch and Schwartz, 1989; Van Bavel et al, 2008; Yang et al, 2014; Oestereich et al, 2019)
One representative work from Cikara et al (2011) on soccer fans showed that the win of the favorite team and the loss of the rival team activate the ventral striatum, which is a reward-related brain region. Both social psychology and neuroimaging studies indicate that in-group bias has an impact on empathy and intergroup schadenfreude
These two principal component analysis (PCA) components were statistically analyzed as the mean amplitudes within different time windows (250–300 ms for PCA-feedbackrelated negativity (FRN), 300– 450 ms for PCA-P300) at their peak channels (i.e., Fz and P1)
Summary
As an important aspect of self-representation in social life, the in-group bias refers to the behavioral pattern of people more favoring in-group members than out-group members, which has been widely explored from both developmental and evolutionary views (Brewer, 1979; Struch and Schwartz, 1989; Van Bavel et al, 2008; Yang et al, 2014; Oestereich et al, 2019). Montalan et al (2012) adopted Minimal Group Paradigm (participants were randomly assigned to different groups: e.g., underestimator and overestimator group in the dot estimation task) to investigate the empathy preference, and found higher pain empathy to ingroup members and lower empathy to out-group members in imagined pain empathy condition Such brain activity of empathy has been shown to be able to predict the altruism motivation (Mathur et al, 2010; Xin et al, 2018) or costly helping (Hein et al, 2010; Preis et al, 2013). One representative work from Cikara et al (2011) on soccer fans showed that the win of the favorite team (in-group) and the loss of the rival team (out-group) activate the ventral striatum, which is a reward-related brain region Taken together, both social psychology and neuroimaging studies indicate that in-group bias has an impact on empathy and intergroup schadenfreude
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