Racial Outgroup Research Articles

The density of social networks moderates effects of intergroup contact

This study tests how the density of the social network in which intergroup contact takes place might affect the extent to which contact improves intergroup attitudes. Having contact with more outgroup members in dense social networks, in which everybody knows each other, may reinforce contact's positive effect. In this case, outgroup contact is shared with ingroup members, which suggests positive ingroup norms toward the outgroup. Alternatively, more contact in denser networks may improve intergroup attitudes less because density may increase subtyping or reduce the salience of ethnic group memberships. These competing hypotheses are tested among white American adults in a nonprobability online sample (N=305) and in a representative national sample (N=1270). In both studies, contact is associated with more positive attitudes toward racial outgroups but the positive contact effect is weakened if that contact takes place in a denser social network.

Parasite stress and pathogen avoidance relate to distinct dimensions of political ideology across 30 nations

People who are more avoidant of pathogens are more politically conservative, as are nations with greater parasite stress. In the current research, we test two prominent hypotheses that have been proposed as explanations for these relationships. The first, which is an intragroup account, holds that these relationships between pathogens and politics are based on motivations to adhere to local norms, which are sometimes shaped by cultural evolution to have pathogen-neutralizing properties. The second, which is an intergroup account, holds that these same relationships are based on motivations to avoid contact with outgroups, who might pose greater infectious disease threats than ingroup members. Results from a study surveying 11,501 participants across 30 nations are more consistent with the intragroup account than with the intergroup account. National parasite stress relates to traditionalism (an aspect of conservatism especially related to adherence to group norms) but not to social dominance orientation (SDO; an aspect of conservatism especially related to endorsements of intergroup barriers and negativity toward ethnic and racial outgroups). Further, individual differences in pathogen-avoidance motives (i.e., disgust sensitivity) relate more strongly to traditionalism than to SDO within the 30 nations.

Correction: Social Groups Prioritize Selective Attention to Faces: How Social Identity Shapes Distractor Interference.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0161426.].

Social Groups Prioritize Selective Attention to Faces: How Social Identity Shapes Distractor Interference.

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.

Neighborhood Associations and Social Capital

In the United States, the past 50 years have witnessed a remarkable expansion of formal associations in residential neighborhoods, including homeowners associations, condo associations, crime watch groups, tenant associations, and special-interest neighborhood coalitions. Despite their prevalence and growing role in neighborhood governance, the relationship of these associations to interpersonal trust and networks among residents and outsiders remains understudied. Drawing on the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey (SCCBS), we estimate the impact of neighborhood association membership on bonding and bridging social capital in a nationally representative sample of residents. Among non-homeowners, our findings suggest that neighborhood association membership is linked to bonding social capital (such as a propensity to socialize and cooperate with neighbors and a positive perception of impact on community conditions), as well as bridging social capital (such as a greater likelihood of trust in racial out-groups). These benefits from neighborhood association membership are attenuated or reversed among homeowners. The results underscore the need for social scientists to consider the inherent tension in neighborhood associations, as institutions that ensure the protection of property values, on the one hand, and that promote neighborhood cooperation and quality of life, on the other.

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.

Power effects on implicit prejudice and stereotyping: The role of intergroup face processing

ABSTRACTPower is thought to increase discrimination toward subordinate groups, yet its effect on different forms of implicit bias remains unclear. We tested whether power enhances implicit racial stereotyping, in addition to implicit prejudice (i.e., evaluative associations), and examined the effect of power on the automatic processing of faces during implicit tasks. Study 1 showed that manipulated high power increased both forms of implicit bias, relative to low power. Using a neural index of visual face processing (the N170 component of the ERP), Study 2 revealed that power affected the encoding of White ingroup vs. Black outgroup faces. Whereas high power increased the relative processing of outgroup faces during evaluative judgments in the prejudice task, it decreased the relative processing of outgroup faces during stereotype trait judgments. An indirect effect of power on implicit prejudice through enhanced processing of outgroup versus ingroup faces suggested a potential link between face processing and implicit bias. Together, these findings demonstrate that power can affect implicit prejudice and stereotyping as well as early processing of racial ingroup and outgroup faces.

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.

Neural correlates of biased social fear learning and interaction in an intergroup context

Associations linking a fearful experience to a member of a social group other than one's own (out-group) are more resistant to change than corresponding associations to a member of one's own (in-group) (Olsson et al., 2005; Kubota et al., 2012), providing a possible link to discriminative behavior. Using a fear conditioning paradigm, we investigated the neural activity underlying aversive learning biases towards in-group (White) and out-group (Black) members, and their predictive value for discriminatory interactive behavior towards novel virtual members of the racial out-group (n=20). Our results indicate that activity in brain regions previously linked to conditioned fear and perception of individuals belonging to the racial out-groups, or otherwise stigmatized groups, jointly contribute to the expression of race-based biases in learning and behavior. In particular, we found that the amygdala and anterior insula (AI) played key roles in differentiating between in-group and out-group faces both when the faces were paired with an aversive event (acquisition) and when no more shocks were administered (extinction). In addition, functional connectivity between the amygdala and the fusiform gyrus increased during perception of conditioned out-group faces. Moreover, we showed that brain activity in the fear-learning-bias network was related to participants' discriminatory interactions with novel out-group members on a later day. Our findings are the first to identify the neural mechanism of fear learning biases towards out-group members, and its relationship to interactive behavior. Our findings provide important clues towards understanding the mechanisms underlying biases between social groups.

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.

Exposure to Racial Out-Groups and Implicit Race Bias in the United States

The industrialized world is becoming more ethnically diverse. Research in several disciplines has suggested that exposure to racial out-groups may be associated with more positive and more negative intergroup attitudes. Given that U.S. states are often at the center of debate regarding diversity-related public policy, we examined how exposure to out-groups is associated with state-level implicit and explicit race bias among White and Black Americans. We found that larger proportions of Black residents across U.S. states were associated with stronger implicit and explicit in-group bias among both White and Black respondents. State-level bias was predicted by proportions of Black residents even when controlling for (a) state-level demographic control variables (e.g., median income), (b) proportions of non-Black minorities, and (c) historical membership in the Confederacy. Our results convey the importance of investigating why diversity may not always have the positive impact on intergroup relations that one might hope it to have.

Social learning of fear and safety is determined by the demonstrator's racial group.

Social learning offers an efficient route through which humans and other animals learn about potential dangers in the environment. Such learning inherently relies on the transmission of social information and should imply selectivity in what to learn from whom. Here, we conducted two observational learning experiments to assess how humans learn about danger and safety from members ('demonstrators') of an other social group than their own. We show that both fear and safety learning from a racial in-group demonstrator was more potent than learning from a racial out-group demonstrator.

Germs and the out-group: Chronic and situational disease concerns affect intergroup categorization.

Throughout human evolutionary history, members of unfamiliar out-groups are likely to have posed significant disease threats. The current studies assessed whether concerns about disease would bias people toward categorizing social targets as members of an unfamiliar out-group. Using a minimal group paradigm, 2 experiments assessed the extent to which perceivers categorized neutral targets and those displaying heuristic disease cues as members of the in-group versus the out-group. A bias toward categorizing targets with heuristic disease cues (but not neutral targets) as members of the novel out-group was observed among people high in chronic germ aversion and among those for whom disease threat had been experimentally primed. Consistent with theories emphasizing the pernicious dangers potentially posed by out-group pathogens, this bias was strongest if the targets were also a part of a racial out-group. Findings suggest a fundamental link between disease avoidance processes and biases in intergroup cognition.

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.

Haven’t I seen you before? Straight men who are insecure of their masculinity remember gender-atypical faces

To navigate a busy interpersonal landscape, people direct perceptual resources in a motivated fashion that maximizes goals and minimizes threats. While adaptive, these heuristics can also lead to noteworthy biases, including a well-documented memory advantage for ingroup members. Recent research has extended these findings to reveal other motivational biases that emerge early in social perception. When perceivers feel threatened, for example, they are vigilant to outgroup members. Although compelling, evidence for this vigilance-threat hypothesis is currently limited to feelings of physical threat and memory for racial outgroups. Here, we extended these findings to a different form of threat—gender identity threat. Four studies documented that straight men who feel insecure about their masculinity have heightened recognition of gender-atypical faces. We therefore argue that gender identity concerns play an important role in social vision, arousing perceptual biases that have implications for how men attend to and remember others in their social environments.

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.