Racial Outgroup Members Research Articles

Manipulations of cognitive strategies and intergroup relationships reduce the racial bias in empathic neural responses

Social relationships affect empathy in humans such that empathic neural responses to perceived pain were stronger to racial in-group members than to racial out-group members. Why does the racial bias in empathy (RBE) occur and how can we reduce it? We hypothesized that perceiving an other-race person as a symbol of a racial group, rather than as an individual, decreases references to his/her personal situation and weakens empathy for that person. This hypothesis predicts that individuating other-race persons by increasing attention to each individual's feelings or enclosing other-race individuals within one's own social group can reduce the RBE by increasing empathic neural responses to other-race individuals. In Experiment 1, we recorded event related brain potentials from Chinese adults as they made race judgments on Asian and Caucasian faces with pain or neutral expressions. We identified the RBE by showing that, relative to neutral expressions, pain expressions increased neural responses at 128-188 ms after stimulus onset over the frontal/central brain regions, and this effect was evident for same-race faces but not for other-race faces. Experiments 2 and 3 found that paying attention to observed individual's feelings of pain and including other-race individuals in one's own team for competitions respectively eliminated the RBE by increasing neural responses to pain expressions in other-race faces. Our results indicate that the RBE is not inevitable and that manipulations of both cognitive strategies and intergroup relationships can decrease RBE-related brain activity.

Reducing prejudice in organizations: The role of intergroup contact, out‐group homogeneity, and in‐group size

AbstractThis survey study investigated the direct and indirect relationships among intergroup contact, in‐group size, out‐group homogeneity, in‐group homogeneity, and prejudice. The participants were 299 White women from seven Catholic congregations in the United States. The survey results indicated that in‐group size was positively related to prejudice toward racial out‐group members. Intergroup contact also mediated the relationship between in‐group size and prejudice. Moreover, perceptions of out‐group homogeneity not only correlated positively with prejudice, but also mediated the relationship between quantity and quality of intergroup contact and prejudice. Finally, perceptions of in‐group homogeneity were positively associated with prejudice. These results not only demonstrate the value of the frequency and depth of intergroup contact on reducing prejudice, but also highlight the role of in‐group size in influencing opportunities for contact. Moreover, perceptions of heterogeneity/uniqueness of both in‐group and out‐group members appear to serve as mechanisms through which contact reduces prejudice.

Knowing You Beyond Race: The Importance of Individual Feature Encoding in the Other-Race Effect

Knowing You Beyond Race: The Importance of Individual Feature Encoding in the Other-Race Effect

Being “In” With the In-Crowd: The Effects of Social Exclusion and Inclusion Are Enhanced by the Perceived Essentialism of Ingroups and Outgroups

Social belonging is an essential human need. Belonging to social groups serves an important role in shaping our social identities. Nonetheless, research indicates that exclusion by ingroup and outgroup members seems equally aversive. The current studies test the hypothesis that unlike more trivial groups (e.g., smoking or computer preferences), highly essentialized groups may lead to differential effects of ingroup versus outgroup rejection. Consistent with this, exclusion and inclusion by racial ingroup members (relative to racial outgroup members) exacerbated the sting of rejection and the glow of inclusion (Study 1). In a second study, direct manipulations of essentialist beliefs about ingroups and outgroups (i.e., political affiliations) led to the same results. These results offer a novel demonstration that essentialized ingroup-outgroup distinctions enhance the sting of social exclusion and the positivity of social inclusion.

Biological conceptions of race and the motivation to cross racial boundaries.

The present studies demonstrate that conceiving of racial group membership as biologically determined increases acceptance of racial inequities (Studies 1 and 2) and cools interest in interacting with racial outgroup members (Studies 3-5). These effects were generally independent of racial prejudice. It is argued that when race is cast as a biological marker of individuals, people perceive racial outgroup members as unrelated to the self and therefore unworthy of attention and affiliation. Biological conceptions of race therefore provide justification for a racially inequitable status quo and for the continued social marginalization of historically disadvantaged groups.