Racial Outgroup Members Research Articles

When the Majority Becomes the Minority: A Longitudinal Study of the Effects of Immersive Experience With Racial Out-Group Members on Implicit and Explicit Racial Biases

The present study investigated the effects of immersive exposure to other-race individuals on racial bias. In Study 1, we tracked African students (N = 85) who went to study at a Chinese university...

Degraded perceptual and affective processing of racial out-groups: An electrophysiological approach

ABSTRACTHuman beings process perceptual and affective information of racial out-groups in a degraded manner. Relative to racial in-group members, we lack perceptual individuation of racial out-group members and empathize their pain to a less degree. To date, however, the relationship between the deficiency of individuation and the impairment of empathy in responding to racial out-groups remains elusive. By recording event-related brain potentials in response to racial in-group and out-group faces portraying pain and neutral expressions, we simultaneously measured neural activity that underpinned individuation and empathy. Deficiency in individuating members of racial out-groups, manifesting as reduced reactivity of face-sensitive N170 in the occipitotemporal region of the brain, predicted attenuation of fronto-central empathic response to the suffering of racial out-groups. Further, the individuation bias mediated the influence of racial prejudice on racial in-group bias in empathic neural responses. These findings suggest an interplay between degraded perceptual and affective processing of racial out-groups.

Examining the Effects of I-Sharing for Future White-Black Interactions

Abstract. Research shows that I-sharing, or sharing subjective experiences with an outgroup member, positively shapes attitudes toward that outgroup member. We investigated whether this type of social experience would also promote a positive interracial interaction with a novel outgroup member. Results showed that White and Black participants who I-shared with a racial outgroup member (vs. I-sharing with a racial ingroup member) expressed more liking toward that outgroup member. However, I-sharing with an outgroup member did not reduce anxious behavior in a future social interaction with a novel racial outgroup member. Therefore, although sharing subjective experiences may increase liking toward one individual from a racial outgroup, it remains to be seen whether this positive experience can influence behaviors in future interactions with other racial outgroup members. Future directions are discussed.

Racial stereotypes impair flexibility of emotional learning.

Flexibility of associative learning can be revealed by establishing and then reversing cue-outcome discriminations. Here, we used functional MRI to examine whether neurobehavioral correlates of reversal-learning are impaired in White and Asian volunteers when initial learning involves fear-conditioning to a racial out-group. For one group, the picture of a Black male was initially paired with shock (threat) and a White male was unpaired (safe). For another group, the White male was a threat and the Black male was safe. These associations reversed midway through the task. Both groups initially discriminated threat from safety, as expressed through skin conductance responses (SCR) and activity in the insula, thalamus, midbrain and striatum. After reversal, the group initially conditioned to a Black male exhibited impaired reversal of SCRs to the new threat stimulus (White male), and impaired reversals in the striatum, anterior cingulate cortex, midbrain and thalamus. In contrast, the group initially conditioned to a White male showed successful reversal of SCRs and successful reversal in these brain regions toward the new threat. These findings provide new evidence that an aversive experience with a racial out-group member impairs the ability to flexibly and appropriately adjust fear expression towards a new threat in the environment.

The impact of motivation on race-based impression formation

Affective biases toward racial out-group members, characterized by White perceivers' negative evaluations of Black individuals, prevail in U.S. culture. Such affective associations have been found to guide race-based impression formation. Accordingly, individuals may strive to resolve inconsistencies when perceiving targets violating their expectations. The current study focuses on the impact of evaluative incongruence on the activity of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) — a brain region previously shown to support impression formation. When asking participants to form impressions of positively and negatively evaluated Black and White individuals, we found preferential dmPFC activity in response to individuals paired with information that violates race-based affective associations. Importantly, individual differences in internal motivation to respond without prejudice (IMS) were found to shape the extent to which dmPFC activity indexes the interactive effects of race and affective associations during impression formation. Specifically, preferential dmPFC activity in response to evaluatively incongruent targets (i.e., Black-positive & White-negative) was present among participants with lower, but not those with higher, levels of IMS. Implications and future directions are discussed in the context of dmPFC involvement in social cognition.

Brief Report

When predominantly White participants in Western countries are asked to shoot individuals in a computer game who may carry weapons, they show a greater bias to shoot at outgroup members and people stereotyped as dangerous. The goal was to determine the extent to which shooter biases in the Middle East would vary as a function of target ethnicity and culturally appropriate or inappropriate headgear. Within a sample of 37 male Saudi Arabian residents, we examined shooter biases outside of Western nations for the first time. Targets in this task were either White or Middle Eastern in appearance, and wore either American style baseball caps or a Saudi Arabian style shemagh and igal. Our results replicated the bias to shoot racial outgroup members observed in Western samples; we found a bias to shoot White over Middle Eastern targets. Unexpectedly, we also found a bias for Saudi participants to shoot at people wearing culturally appropriate traditional Saudi headgear over Western style baseball caps. To explain this latter finding, we cautiously speculate that relative perceptions of dangerousness in the Middle East may be influenced by media exposure and changing social conditions in the region.

Oxytocin receptor gene and racial ingroup bias in empathy-related brain activity

The human brain responds more strongly to racial ingroup than outgroup individuals' pain. This racial ingroup bias varies across individuals and has been attributed to social experiences. What remains unknown is whether the racial ingroup bias in brain activity is associated with a genetic polymorphism. We investigated genetic associations of racial ingroup bias in the brain activity to racial ingroup and outgroup faces that received painful or non-painful stimulations by scanning A/A and G/G homozygous of the oxytocin receptor gene polymorphism (OXTR rs53576) using functional MRI. We found that G/G compared to A/A individuals showed stronger activity in the anterior cingulate and supplementary motor area (ACC/SMA) in response to racial ingroup members' pain, whereas A/A relative to G/G individuals exhibited greater activity in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) in response to racial outgroup members' pain. Moreover, the racial ingroup bias in ACC/SMA activity positively predicted participants' racial ingroup bias in implicit attitudes and NAcc activity to racial outgroup individuals' pain negatively predicted participants' motivations to reduce racial outgroup members' pain. Our results suggest that the two variants of OXTR rs53576 are associated with racial ingroup bias in brain activities that are linked to implicit attitude and altruistic motivation, respectively.

The role of expression and race in weapons identification.

Emotional expressions can signal intentions and so possess the power to moderate social inferences. Here, we test whether stereotypes implicitly elicited by a stigmatized racial outgroup member are moderated by facial expression. Participants classified pictures of guns and tools that were primed with pictures of Black and White male faces posing angry, happy, and neutral expressions. Across the 3 measures examined--response latencies, error rates, and automatic processing, facial expression modulated implicit stereotyping (Study 1, n = 71; Study 2, n = 166). A Black angry prime elicited implicit stereotyping, while a Black happy prime diminished implicit stereotyping. Responding after neutral primes varied as a function of the expression context. When viewed alongside more threatening expressions (Study 1), neutral Black targets no longer elicited implicit stereotyping, but when viewed alongside more threatening expressions (Study 2), neutral Black targets primed crime and danger-relevant stereotypes. These results demonstrate that an individual can activate different associations based on changes in emotional expression and that a feature present in many everyday encounters (a smile) attenuates implicit racial stereotyping.

The Impact of Childhood Experience on Amygdala Response to Perceptually Familiar Black and White Faces

Given the well-documented involvement of the amygdala in race perception, the current study aimed to investigate how interracial contact during childhood shapes amygdala response to racial outgroup members in adulthood. Of particular interest was the impact of childhood experience on amygdala response to familiar, compared with novel, Black faces. Controlling for a number of well-established individual difference measures related to interracial attitudes, the results reveal that perceivers with greater childhood exposure to racial outgroup members display greater relative reduction in amygdala response to familiar Black faces. The implications of such findings are discussed in the context of previous investigations into the neural substrates of race perception and in consideration of potential mechanisms by which childhood experience may shape race perception.

Stress and coping in interracial contexts: The influence of race-based rejection sensitivity and cross-group friendship in daily experiences of health.

We examined the interplay of psychosocial risk and protective factors in daily experiences of health. In Study 1, the tendency to anxiously expect rejection from racial outgroup members, termed race-based rejection sensitivity (RS-race), was cross-sectionally related to greater stress-symptoms among Black adults who reported fewer cross-race friends but not among participants who had more cross-race friends. In Study 2, we experimentally manipulated the development of a same- versus cross-race friendship among Latino/a-White dyads prior to collecting daily experiences of stress-symptoms using a diary methodology. While RS-race predicted more psychosomatic symptoms in the same-race friendship condition, RS-race was unrelated to symptomatology among participants who made a cross-race friend. These findings suggest that experiences of intergroup stress can spill over into everyday life in the absence of positive contact, but cross-race friendships may be a resource that mitigates the expression of interracial stress.

Close contact with racial outgroup members moderates attentional allocation towards outgroup versus ingroup faces

Some research has demonstrated that White perceivers direct more initial attention to Black relative to White target faces, while other work has failed to show this relationship. Several variables have been identified that moderate early attention to racial outgroup versus racial ingroup faces. In the current paper, two studies sought to extend this work by testing whether close contact with racial outgroup members moderates the amount of initial attention directed towards racial outgroup members relative to ingroup members using a dot-probe task. In Study 1, Whites’ attentional allocation to Black versus White faces was moderated by the amount of close and meaningful contact with Blacks. Study 2 extended these findings by demonstrating that Whites’ attentional allocation to Asian relative to White faces was moderated by close contact with Asians. These findings identify close outgroup contact as an additional moderating variable in the attentional capture of racial outgroup versus ingroup faces, for groups both associated and not associated with threat.

Differences in Anticipated Interaction Drive Own Group Biases in Face Memory

According to much research, the Own Group Bias (OGB) in face memory occurs as a consequence of social categorization – ingroup members are more likely than outgroup members to be encoded as individuals and remembered well. The current work is an examination of the role of anticipated future interaction in the OGB. We conducted two studies showing that anticipated interaction influences group-based face memory. In Study 1, we provided correlational evidence that beliefs about the amount and importance of future interaction one will have with racial outgroup members is associated with the OGB, such that people expecting more interaction with outgroup members show a reduced OGB. In Study 2, we manipulated expectations about future interactions with lab-created groups and observed that high levels of anticipated future interaction with the outgroup eliminated the OGB. Thus, social group categorization drives face memory biases to the extent that group membership affords the expectation of interpersonal interaction.

The invisible man: Interpersonal goals moderate inattentional blindness to African Americans.

Research on inattentional blindness demonstrates that when attending to 1 set of stimuli, people often fail to consciously perceive a task-irrelevant object. In this experiment, we tested for selective inattentional blindness to racial outgroup members. We reasoned that some racial groups would be perceived as more relevant than others, depending on the interpersonal goal that was active. White participants were primed with interpersonal goals that ranged from psychologically distant (searching for a coworker) to psychologically close (searching for a romantic partner). In the control condition, no goal was explicitly activated. Then, participants watched a video of 2 teams passing a ball and were asked to count the ball passes of one of the teams. In the middle of the video, a Caucasian or an African American man walked through the scene. Participants were then asked to report whether they had seen the interloper. Results revealed that as interpersonal goals became closer to the self, participants were less likely to see the African American man. This research demonstrates a new form of social exclusion based on early attention processes that may perpetuate racial bias.

Addressing the empathy deficit: beliefs about the malleability of empathy predict effortful responses when empathy is challenging.

Empathy is often thought to occur automatically. Yet, empathy frequently breaks down when it is difficult or distressing to relate to people in need, suggesting that empathy is often not felt reflexively. Indeed, the United States as a whole is said to be displaying an empathy deficit. When and why does empathy break down, and what predicts whether people will exert effort to experience empathy in challenging contexts? Across 7 studies, we found that people who held a malleable mindset about empathy (believing empathy can be developed) expended greater empathic effort in challenging contexts than did people who held a fixed theory (believing empathy cannot be developed). Specifically, a malleable theory of empathy--whether measured or experimentally induced--promoted (a) more self-reported effort to feel empathy when it is challenging (Study 1); (b) more empathically effortful responses to a person with conflicting views on personally important sociopolitical issues (Studies 2-4); (c) more time spent listening to the emotional personal story of a racial outgroup member (Study 5); and (d) greater willingness to help cancer patients in effortful, face-to-face ways (Study 6). Study 7 revealed a possible reason for this greater empathic effort in challenging contexts: a stronger interest in improving one's empathy. Together, these data suggest that people's mindsets powerfully affect whether they exert effort to empathize when it is needed most, and these data may represent a point of leverage in increasing empathic behaviors on a broad scale.

Probing Prejudice with Startle Eyeblink Modification: A Marker of Attention, Emotion, or Both?

In social neuroscience research, startle eyeblink modification can serve as a marker of emotion, but it is less clear whether it can also serve as a marker of prejudice. In Experiment 1, 30 White students viewed photographs of White and Black targets while the startle eyeblink reflex and facial EMG from the brow and cheek regions were recorded. Prejudice was related to facial EMG activity, but not to startle modification, which instead appeared to index attention to race. To test further whether racial categorizations are associated with differential attention, a dual-task paradigm was used in Experiment 2. Fifty-four White and fifty-five Black participants responded more slowly to a tone presented when viewing a racial outgroup member or a negative stimulus, indicating that both draw more attention than ingroup members or positive stimuli. We conclude that startle modification is useful to index differential attention to groups when intergroup threat is low.

Task modulations of racial bias in neural responses to others' suffering

Recent event related brain potential research observed a greater frontal activity to pain expressions of racial in-group than out-group members and such racial bias in neural responses to others' suffering was modulated by task demands that emphasize race identity or painful feeling. However, as pain expressions activate multiple brain regions in the pain matrix, it remains unclear which part of the neural circuit in response to others' suffering undergoes modulations by task demands. We scanned Chinese adults, using functional MRI, while they categorized Asian and Caucasian faces with pain or neutral expressions in terms of race or identified painful feelings of each individual face. We found that pain vs. neutral expressions of Asian but not Caucasian faces activated the anterior cingulate (ACC) and anterior insular (AI) activity during race judgments. However, pain compared to race judgments increased ACC and AI activity to pain expressions of Caucasian but not Asian faces. Moreover, race judgments induced increased activity in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex whereas pain judgments increased activity in the bilateral temporoparietal junction. The results suggest that task demands emphasizing an individual's painful feeling increase ACC/AI activities to pain expressions of racial out-group members and reduce the racial bias in empathic neural responses.

Reverse Subtyping: The Effects of Prejudice Level on the Subtyping of Counterstereotypic Outgroup Members

Although many anti-bias interventions try to overcome stereotypes by presenting positive and/or counterstereotypic members of the outgroup, people often subtype these members and refuse to see them as typical of the outgroup. Although subtyping has been shown to be a common phenomenon, it is unclear if preexisting attitudes moderate this process. The current study examined whether preexisting prejudice levels would moderate the subtyping process. Specifically, it was found that although high-prejudiced individuals subtyped a positive racial outgroup member, low-prejudiced individuals demonstrated the opposite pattern and subtyped negative outgroup members as being atypical. This suggests that although the subtyping phenomenon may be universal, its expression is moderated by preexisting intergroup attitudes.

Slithering snakes, angry men and out-group members: What and whom are we evolved to fear?

The preparedness theory of classical conditioning proposed by Seligman (1970, 1971) has been applied extensively over the past 40 years to explain the nature and “source” of human fear and phobias. In this review we examine the formative studies that tested the four defining characteristics of prepared learning with animal fear-relevant stimuli (typically snakes and spiders) and consider claims that fear of social stimuli, such as angry faces, or faces of racial out-group members, may also be acquired utilising the same preferential learning mechanism. Exposition of critical differences between fear learning to animal and social stimuli suggests that a single account cannot adequately explain fear learning with animal and social stimuli. We demonstrate that fear conditioned to social stimuli is less robust than fear conditioned to animal stimuli as it is susceptible to cognitive influence and propose that it may instead reflect on negative stereotypes and social norms. Thus, a theoretical model that can accommodate the influence of both biological and cultural factors is likely to have broader utility in the explanation of fear and avoidance responses than accounts based on a single mechanism.

Cultural experiences reduce racial bias in neural responses to others’ suffering

Recent neuroimaging research has shown increased neural activity in adults in response to perceived pain in same-race versus other-race individuals. Moreover, manipulations of cognitive strategies and intergroup relationships in laboratory can significantly reduce the racial bias in empathic neural responses by increasing the neural activity to perceived pain in other-race individuals. The current study further investigated whether real-life cultural experiences with other-race individuals can reduce the racial bias in empathic neural responses to others’ suffering. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we scanned 20 Chinese adults who were brought up in Western countries (United States, United Kingdom, and Canada) where Caucasians consist of the majority of population. Participants viewed video clips in which either Asian or Caucasian models received painful or non-painful stimulations. We found that the neural activity in the pain matrix including the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula, inferior frontal cortex and somatosensory cortex was significantly increased in response to painful versus non-painful stimuli applied to both Asian and Caucasian models. Moreover, these empathic neural responses to Asian and Caucasian models did not differ significantly and were positively correlated with each other. Our results indicate that cultural experiences with racial out-group members may increase the neural responses to the suffering of other-race individuals and thus reduce the racial bias in empathy.

Oxytocin modulates the racial bias in neural responses to others’ suffering

The intergroup relationship between a perceiver and a target person influences empathic neural responses to others’ suffering, which are increased for racial in-group members compared to out-group members. The current study investigated whether oxytocin (OT), a neuropeptide that has been linked to empathic concern and in-group favoritism, contributes to the racial bias in empathic neural responses. Event-related brain potentials were recorded in Chinese male adults during race judgments on Asian and Caucasian faces expressing pain or showing a neutral expression after intranasal self-administration of OT or placebo. A fronto-central positive activity at 128–188ms (P2) was of larger amplitude in response to the pain expressions compared with the neutral expressions of racial in-group members but not of racial out-group members. OT treatment increased this racial in-group bias in neural responses and resulted in its correlation with a positive implicit attitude toward racial in-group members. Our findings suggest that OT interacts with the intergroup relationship to modulate empathic neural responses to others’ suffering.