Intergroup Perception and Cognition

Within-person dynamics of attention to race and expression of race bias: a real-time test of the self-regulation of prejudice model

Prior research has supported some aspects of a theorized prejudice self-regulation model. We provide the first test of the full model-based process of bias regulation as it unfolds in real time. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from White undergraduates at two large American universities (N = 130; 40% female) during a racial stereotype priming task. Attention to Black male face primes, indexed by the P2 ERP, increased following self-regulation failures. In turn, within-person, trial-to-trial variability in attention to Black male faces predicted variability in bias expression. The latter effect was moderated by individual differences in internal motivation to respond without prejudice (IMS). Specifically, among lower-IMS individuals, trials in which Black faces elicited relatively larger P2 amplitudes (relative to an individual's own average P2 amplitude) were associated with increased behavioral race bias. In contrast, and consistent with theory, among higher-IMS individuals trials in which Black faces elicited larger relative P2 amplitudes were associated with decreased bias. Findings provide direct evidence supporting the temporal sequencing of race-bias regulation and identify within-person variability in attention to race as a potential mechanism for determining when and in whom bias will be regulated.

A Race-Based Size Bias for Black Adolescent Boys: Size, Innocence, and Threat

We adopted an intersectional stereotyping lens to investigate whether race-based size bias-the tendency to judge Black men as larger than White men-extends to adolescents. Participants judged Black boys as taller than White boys, despite no real size differences (Studies 1A and 1B), and even when boys were matched in age (Study 1B). The size bias persisted when participants viewed computer-generated faces that varied only in apparent race (Study 2A) and extended to perceptions of physical strength, with Black boys judged as stronger than White boys (Study 2B). The size bias was associated with threat-related perceptions, including beliefs that Black boys were less innocent than White boys (Study 3). Finally, the size bias was moderated by a valid threat signal (i.e., anger expressions, Studies 4A and 4B). Thus, adult-like threat stereotypes are perpetrated upon Black boys, leading them to be erroneously perceived as more physically formidable than White boys.

Racial Bias in Pediatric Pain Perception

Racial disparities in pediatric pain care are prevalent across a variety of health care settings, and likely contribute to broader disparities in health, morbidity, and mortality. The present research expands on prior work demonstrating potential perceptual contributions to pain care disparities in adults and tests whether racial bias in pain perception extends to child targets. We examined the perception and hypothetical treatment of pain in Black and White boys (experiment 1), Black and White boys and girls (experiment 2), Black and White boys and adult men (experiment 3), and Black, White, Asian, and Latinx boys (experiment 4). Across this work, pain was less readily perceived on Black (vs White) boys' faces-though this bias was not observed within girls. Moreover, this perceptual bias was comparable in magnitude to the same bias measured with adult targets and consistently predicted bias in hypothetical treatment. Notably, bias was not limited to Black targets-pain on Hispanic/Latinx boys' faces was also relatively underperceived. Taken together, these results offer strong evidence for racial bias in pediatric pain perception. PERSPECTIVE: This article demonstrates perceptual contributions to racial bias in pediatric pain recognition. Participants consistently saw pain less readily on Black boys' faces, compared with White boys, and this perceptual bias consistently predicted race-based gaps in treatment. This work reveals a novel factor that may support pediatric pain care disparities.

Intergroup evaluative bias in facial representations of immigrants and citizens in the United States

We used a reverse-correlation image-classification paradigm to visualize facial representations of immigrants and citizens in the United States. Visualizations of immigrants' faces were judged by independent raters as less trustworthy and less competent and were more likely to be categorized as a non-White race/ethnicity than were visualizations of citizens' faces. Additionally, image generators' personal characteristics (e.g., implicit and explicit evaluations of immigrants, nativity status) did not reliably track with independent judges' ratings of image generators' representations of immigrants. These findings suggest that anti-immigrant sentiment and racial/ethnic assumptions characterize facial representations of immigrants in the United States, even among people who harbor positivity toward immigrants.

Motivation and prediction-driven processing of social memoranda

Social semantic memory guides many aspects of behavior. Individuals rely on acquired and inferred knowledge about personal characteristics and group membership to predict the behavior and character of social targets. These predictions then determine the expectations from, the behavior in, and the interpretations of social interactions. According to predictive processing accounts, mnemonic and attentional mechanisms should enhance the processing of prediction-violating events. However, empirical findings suggest that prediction-consistent social events are often better remembered. This mini-review integrates recent evidence from social and non-social memory research to highlight the role of motivation in explaining these discrepancies. A particular emphasis is given to the continuous nature of prediction-(in)consistency, the epistemic tendency of perceivers to maintain or update their knowledge, and the dynamic influences of motivation on multiple steps in prediction-driven social memory. The suggested framework provides a coherent outlook of existing work and offers promising future directions to better understand the ebb and flow of social memoranda.

Social perception of robots is shaped by beliefs about their minds

Roboticists often imbue robots with human-like physical features to increase the likelihood that they are afforded benefits known to be associated with anthropomorphism. Similarly, deepfakes often employ computer-generated human faces to attempt to create convincing simulacra of actual humans. In the present work, we investigate whether perceivers' higher-order beliefs about faces (i.e., whether they represent actual people or android robots) modulate the extent to which perceivers deploy face-typical processing for social stimuli. Past work has shown that perceivers' recognition performance is more impacted by the inversion of faces than objects, thus highlighting that faces are processed holistically (i.e., as Gestalt), whereas objects engage feature-based processing. Here, we use an inversion task to examine whether face-typical processing is attenuated when actual human faces are labeled as non-human (i.e., android robot). This allows us to employ a task shown to be differentially sensitive to social (i.e., faces) and non-social (i.e., objects) stimuli while also randomly assigning face stimuli to seem real or fake. The results show smaller inversion effects when face stimuli were believed to represent android robots compared to when they were believed to represent humans. This suggests that robots strongly resembling humans may still fail to be perceived as "social" due pre-existing beliefs about their mechanistic nature. Theoretical and practical implications of this research are discussed.

Does the union always make the force? Group status and recategorization influence the perceived physical formidability of potential coalition groups

Coalitions among individuals and between groups, which have had critical evolutionary benefits for humans, play an important role in contemporary life. One key element of the processes of assessing potential allies is how they may contribute to the perceived physical formidability - fighting ability or the capacity to inflict costs on others - of the alliance. In three studies, focused for the first time on intergroup coalitions, we investigated how qualities of the groups such as status (social prestige) and the relationship between them influence the perceived physical formidability of a coalition (i.e., European Union, EU). Study 1 found that the inclusion of a group with higher or similar (but not lower) status increased the perceived formidability of the EU. Studies 2 and 3 showed that learning that ingroup members recategorized a low-status group within a common-group identity increased the perceived formidability of the EU including that group, compared with the conditions in which either outgroup members recategorized or no information was provided. Study 3 also revealed mediation by fusion - a visceral connection - with outgroup members, which has been relatively unexplored. Taken together, these studies reveal that both, status and social identity processes, may significantly affect the estimations of coalitional formidability.

Stuck on Intergroup Attitudes: The Need to Shift Gears to Change Intergroup Behaviors

Decades of research on how to improve intergroup relations have primarily examined ways to change prejudiced attitudes. However, this focus on negative intergroup attitudes has yielded few effective solutions. Because intergroup relations are shaped by behavior during intergroup interactions, it is necessary to identify constructs that have a strong causal impact on intergroup behavior change. In this article, I will discuss evidence showing that intergroup attitude change is neither a sufficient nor necessary cause for intergroup behavior change. Empirical research suggests that intergroup attitudes are difficult to change and have a limited effect on intergroup behavior. I also distinguish between constructs that primarily affect intergroup attitude change (e.g., counterstereotypical exemplars, evaluative conditioning) and constructs that primarily affect intergroup behavior change (e.g., social norms, self-efficacy). Further, suggestions for future research will also be provided to advance understanding of the various psychological constructs that influence intergroup behavior change, which will help us develop effective methods of improving intergroup relations.

Social Anxiety and Bullying Victimization in Children and Early Adolescents: The Role of Developmental Period and Immigrant Status

Research reveals that social anxiety may be predictive of bullying victimization, but it is not clear whether this relation stands for different groups of youth. The present study examines this association by employing a longitudinal design over 1 year and including the moderating role of developmental period (childhood vs. early adolescence) and students' immigrant status (native vs. non-native). T1 sample included 506 children (46.44% girls, mean age M = 8.55 years, SD = 0.55) and 310 early adolescents (50% girls, mean age = 12.54 years, SD = 0.59) recruited in schools in Northern Italy. Due to missing cases and drop-outs from T1 to T2, the final sample comprised 443 and 203 students from primary and middle school, respectively. Social anxiety and peer victimization were assessed through self-reported questionnaires. Results indicated that victimization at T2 was predicted by a 3-way interaction between T1 social anxiety, immigrant status, and developmental period. In particular, socially anxious early adolescents with an immigrant background were the most victimized. The results are discussed in terms of group dynamics and intergroup processes. The findings highlight the importance of personal variables in the cumulation of risks: social anxiety is more predictive of bullying victimization for immigrant early adolescents than for children or native early adolescents.

Stereotypes shape response competition when forming impressions

Dynamic models of impression formation posit that bottom-up factors (e.g., a target's facial features) and top-down factors (e.g., perceiver knowledge of stereotypes) continuously interact over time until a stable categorization or impression emerges. Most previous work on the dynamic resolution of judgments over time has focused on either categorization (e.g., "is this person male/female?") or specific trait impressions (e.g., "is this person trustworthy?"). In two mousetracking studies-exploratory (N = 226) and confirmatory (N = 300)-we test a domain-general effect of cultural stereotypes shaping the process underlying impressions of targets. We find that the trajectories of participants' mouse movements gravitate toward impressions congruent with their stereotype knowledge. For example, to the extent that a participant reports knowledge of a "Black men are less [trait]" stereotype, their mouse trajectory initially gravitates toward categorizing individual Black male faces as "less [trait]," regardless of their final judgment of the target.

Everyday Perceiver-Context Influences on Impression Formation: No Evidence of Consistent Effects

Facial impressions (e.g., trustworthy, intelligent) vary considerably across different perceivers and targets. However, nearly all existing research comes from participants evaluating faces on a computer screen in a lab or office environment. We explored whether social perceptions could additionally be influenced by perceivers' experiential factors that vary in daily life: mood, environment, physiological state, and psychological situations. To that end, we tracked daily changes in participants' experienced contexts during impression formation using experience sampling. We found limited evidence that perceivers' contexts are an important factor in impressions. Perceiver context alone does not systematically influence trait impressions in a consistent manner-suggesting that perceiver and target idiosyncrasies are the most powerful drivers of social impressions. Overall, results suggest that perceivers' experienced contexts may play only a small role in impressions formed from faces.

Race-shifting in the United States: Latinxs, Skin Tone, and Ethnoracial Alignments

In the study, we engage the question of racial "fluidity" by examining patterns of ethnoracial identification in adolescence and, importantly, shifts in ethnoracial identification between adolescence and adulthood using two waves of data from a nationally representative, longitudinal study of adolescents who were in Grades 7 to 12 during the 1994 to 1995 school year. Our theoretical framework draws from social identity theory and brings together bodies of research in race and immigration to make a case for the importance of phenotype, ancestry, and sociocultural elements as potential mechanisms for patterns among Latinx youth, as shifts in ethnoracial identification are predominantly a Latinx phenomenon. The bulk of the findings suggest that both phenotype and immigration are important factors for ethnoracial self-identification among Latinx youth, as well as shifts in their ethnoracial identification in young adulthood. Given what we know about ethnoracial categorization and ascription, findings suggest that, overall, shifts in ethnoracial identification among Latinx youth are primarily about bringing their self-identification into alignment with how they think they tend to be (and most likely are) perceived by others, which we suggest represents a Sedimentation of the Color Line. We close by discussing the myriad implications of our findings for the U.S. racial order and the ongoing debate about how to "measure" the Latinx population.

Neural Basis of Prejudice and Prejudice Reduction

Social prejudices, based on race, ethnicity, gender, or other identities, pervade how we perceive, think about, and act toward others. Research on the neural basis of prejudice seeks to illuminate its effects by investigating the neurocognitive processes through which prejudice is formed, represented in the mind, expressed in behavior, and potentially reduced. In this article, we review current knowledge about the social neuroscience of prejudice regarding its influence on rapid social perception, representation in memory, emotional expression and relation to empathy, and regulation, and we discuss implications of this work for prejudice reduction interventions.

Language as a cue for social categorization in bilingual communities

This registered report article investigates the role of language as a dimension of social categorization. Our critical aim was to investigate whether categorization based on language occurs even when the languages coexist within the same sociolinguistic context, as is the case in bilingual communities. Bilingual individuals of two bilingual communities, the Basque Country (Spain) and Veneto (Italy), were tested using the memory confusion paradigm in a 'Who said what?' task. In the encoding part of the task, participants were presented with different faces together with auditory sentences. Two different languages of the sentences were presented in each study, with half of the faces always associated with one language and the other half with the other language. Spanish and Basque languages were used in Study 1, and Italian and Venetian dialect in Study 2. In the test phase, the auditory sentences were presented again and participants were required to decide which face uttered each sentence. As expected, participants error rates were high. Critically, participants were more likely to confuse faces from the same language category than from the other (different) language category. The results indicate that bilinguals categorize individuals belonging to the same sociolinguistic community based on the language these individuals speak, suggesting that social categorization based on language is an automatic process.

Pedophile, Child Lover, or Minor-Attracted Person? Attitudes Toward Labels Among People Who are Sexually Attracted to Children

The primary label for people who are sexually attracted to children ("pedophile") is conflated with sexual offending behavior and tainted with stigma. In the present pre-registered mixed-method study, we therefore investigated attitudes and preferences regarding "pedophile/hebephile" and other labels among 286 people who report a stronger or equally strong sexual attraction to prepubescent and pubescent children than to adults. Overall, quantitative data showed acceptance of "pedophile/hebephile" as well as a range of alternative labels in a personal (Labeling Oneself) and a professional context (Being Labeled by Others). "Minor-attracted person" and "pedophile/hebephile" received generally higher support than other terms and appeared to be least divisive across three major online fora. Qualitative data revealed four themes: "Contested self-labels," "Person-first language and pathologizing sexuality/identity," "Stigma and shame," and "Reclaiming the pedophile label." Our results allow deeper insight into reasons for adopting certain labels over others, as well as difficulties of finding a non-stigmatizing label. We discuss limitations of the study and practical implications for clinical and research contexts.

People perception and stereotype-based responding: task context matters

Whether group impact social perception is a topic of renewed theoretical and empirical interest. In particular, it remains unclear when and how the composition of a group influences a core component of social cognition-stereotype-based responding. Accordingly, exploring this issue, here we investigated the extent to which different task requirements moderate the stereotype-related products of people perception. Following the presentation of same-sex groups that varied in facial typicality (i.e., high or low femininity/masculinity), participants had to report either the gender-related status of target words (i.e., a group-irrelevant gender-classification task) or whether the items were stereotypic or counter-stereotypic with respect to the preceding groups (i.e., a group-relevant stereotype-status task). Critically, facial typicality only impacted performance in the stereotype-status task. A further computational analysis (i.e., Diffusion Model) traced this effect to the combined operation of stimulus processing and response biases during decision-making. Specifically, evidence accumulation was faster when targets followed groups that were high (vs. low) in typicality and these arrays also triggered a stronger bias toward stereotypic (vs. counter-stereotypic) responses. Collectively, these findings elucidate when and how group variability influences people perception.

Distinct trajectories of psychological distress among resettled refugees: Community acceptance predicts resilience while low ingroup social support predicts clinical distress

Refugees can experience elevated levels of psychological distress upon resettlement, although disparate outcomes over time are expected. The current study modeled trajectories of changes in distress over a 5-year period among resettled refugees and sought to explicate post-settlement factors that influence distress over time. A large-scale sample of refugees resettled in Australia (2,399) was tracked over a 5-year period, completing measures of psychological distress at each wave and initial risk and protective factors immediately after resettlement. A latent class growth analysis conducted on distress found four unique classes characterized by (1) resilient levels of distress, (2) consistent clinical distress, (3) recovering levels of distress, and (4) deteriorating distress. Lower perceived discrimination and greater positive context of reception predicted membership to the resilient group and differentiated the recovering and deteriorating groups. Further, lower ingroup social support predicted membership to the clinically distressed group relative to all others. We conclude by echoing calls to strengthen community support for refugees and promote ingroup ties, particularly among those who are the most vulnerable.

Perceiving ingroup and outgroup faces within and across nations

The human face is arguably the most important of all social stimuli because it provides so much valuable information about others. Therefore, one critical factor for successful social communication is the ability to process faces. In general, a wide body of social cognitive research has demonstrated that perceivers are better at extracting information from their own-race compared to other-race faces and that these differences can be a barrier to positive cross-race relationships. The primary objective of the present paper was to provide an overview of how people process faces in diverse contexts, focusing on racial ingroup and outgroup members within one nation and across nations. To achieve this goal, we first broadly describe social cognitive research on categorization processes related to ingroups vs. outgroups. Next, we briefly examine two prominent mechanisms (experience and motivation) that have been used to explain differences in recognizing facial identities and identifying emotions when processing ingroup and outgroup racial faces within nations. Then, we explore research in this domain across nations and cultural explanations, such as norms and practices, that supplement the two proposed mechanisms. Finally, we propose future cross-cultural research that has the potential to help us better understand the role of these key mechanisms in processing ingroup and outgroup faces.

Racial Bias in Police Traffic Stops: White Residents' County-Level Prejudice and Stereotypes Are Related to Disproportionate Stopping of Black Drivers

Racial disparities in policing are well documented, but the reasons for such disparities are often debated. In the current research, we weighed in on this debate using a regional-level bias framework: We investigated the link between racial disparities in police traffic stops and regional-level racial bias, employing data from more than 130 million police traffic stops in 1,413 U.S. counties and county-level measures of racial bias from more than 2 million online respondents. Compared with their population share in county demographics, Black drivers were stopped at disproportionate rates in the majority of counties. Crucially, disproportionate stopping of Black drivers was higher in counties with higher levels of racial prejudice by White residents (rs = .07-.36). Furthermore, county-level aggregates of White people's threat-related stereotypes were less consistent in predicting disproportionate stopping (rs = .00-.19). These observed relationships between regional-level bias and racial disparities in policing highlight the importance of the context in which police operate.

Examining Multiracial Pride, Identity-based Challenges, and Discrimination: An Exploratory Investigation among Biracial Emerging Adults

This study investigated the main and interactive effects of identity-based challenges, discrimination, and Multiracial pride on psychological distress in Biracial emerging adults. Additionally, we examined whether these associations may differ by Biracial sub-group (e.g., Black-White, Asian-White, Latinx-White, and minority-minority) given their unique racial experiences. Participants were 326 Biracial emerging adults (Mage = 19.57 years old; 75.2% female) recruited from three public universities in the United States for an online survey. For all Biracial groups, identity-based challenges were associated with greater psychological distress. After testing a series of competing multi-group regression models, results indicated that the relations between distress and our predictors: identity-based challenges, discrimination, and Multiracial pride do indeed differ across Biracial sub-group. The most apparent and unique differences were displayed by the Black-White Biracial sub-group. These findings highlight identity-based challenges as a unique risk in the Biracial population and suggest that a principled comparison between Biracial sub-groups is necessary to tease apart group-specific associations between these constructs and psychological distress.

Facial Impressions Are Predicted by the Structure of Group Stereotypes

Impressions of other people's faces (e.g., trustworthiness) have long been thought to be evoked by morphological variation (e.g., upturned mouth) in a universal, fixed manner. However, recent research suggests that these impressions vary considerably across perceivers and targets' social-group memberships. Across 4,247 U.S. adults recruited online, we investigated whether racial and gender stereotypes may be a critical factor underlying this variability in facial impressions. In Study 1, we found that not only did facial impressions vary by targets' gender and race, but also the structure of these impressions was associated with the structure of stereotype knowledge. Study 2 extended these findings by demonstrating that individual differences in perceivers' own unique stereotype associations predicted the structure of their own facial impressions. Together, the findings suggest that the structure of people's impressions of others' faces is driven not only by the morphological variation of the face but also by learned stereotypes about social groups.

Person Perception, Meet People Perception: Exploring the Social Vision of Groups

Groups, teams, and collectives-people-are incredibly important to human behavior. People live in families, work in teams, and celebrate and mourn together in groups. Despite the huge variety of human group activity and its fundamental importance to human life, social-psychological research on person perception has overwhelmingly focused on its namesake, the person, rather than expanding to consider people perception. By looking to two unexpected partners, the vision sciences and organization behavior, we find emerging work that presents a path forward, building a foundation for understanding how people perceive other people. And yet this nascent field is missing critical insights that scholars of social vision might offer: specifically, for example, the chance to connect perception to behavior through the mediators of cognition and motivational processes. Here, we review emerging work across the vision and social sciences to extract core principles of people perception: efficiency, capacity, and complexity. We then consider complexity in more detail, focusing on how people perception modifies person-perception processes and enables the perception of group emergent properties as well as group dynamics. Finally, we use these principles to discuss findings and outline areas fruitful for future work. We hope that fellow scholars take up this people-perception call.

Does Emotional Expression Moderate Implicit Racial Bias? Examining Bias Following Smiling and Angry Primes

Given the pervasiveness of prejudice, researchers have become increasingly interested in examining racial bias at the intersection of race and other social and perceptual categories that have the potential to disrupt these negative attitudes. Across three studies, we examined whether the emotional expression of racial exemplars would moderate implicit racial bias. We found that racial bias on the Affect Misattribution Procedure only emerged in response to angry but not smiling Black male faces in comparison to White (Study 1) or White and Asian (Study 3) male faces with similar emotional expressions. Racial bias was also found toward Asian targets (Studies 2 and 3), but not only following angry primes. These findings suggest that negative stereotypes about Black men can create a contrast effect, making racial bias toward smiling faces less likely to be expressed in the presence of angry Black male faces.

Comparing person and people perception: Multiple group members do not increase stereotype priming

A characteristic feature of daily life is encountering people in groups. Surprisingly, however, at least during the initial stages of processing, research has focused almost exclusively on the construal of single individuals. As such, it remains unclear whether person and people (i.e., group) perception yield comparable or divergent outcomes. Addressing this issue, here we explored a core social-cognitive topic-stereotype activation-by presenting both single and multiple facial primes in a sequential-priming task. In addition, the processes underlying task performance were probed using a drift diffusion model analysis. Based on prior work, it was hypothesised that multiple (vs. single) primes would increase stereotype-based responding. Across two experiments, a consistent pattern of results emerged. First, stereotype priming was insensitive to the number of primes that were presented and occurred only at a short prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (i.e., 250 ms). Second, priming was underpinned by a bias towards congruent (vs. incongruent) prime-target responses. Collectively these findings advance understanding of the emergence and origin of stereotype priming during person and people perception.

Examining Automatic Stereotyping From a Propositional Perspective: Is Automatic Stereotyping Sensitive to Relational and Validity Information?

Research on automatic stereotyping is dominated by the idea that automatic stereotyping reflects the activation of (group-trait) associations. In two preregistered experiments (total N = 391), we tested predictions derived from an alternative perspective that suggests that automatic stereotyping is the result of the activation of propositional representations that, unlike associations, can encode relational information and have truth values. Experiment 1 found that automatic stereotyping is sensitive to the validity of information about pairs of traits and groups. Experiment 2 showed that automatic stereotyping is sensitive to the specific relations (e.g., whether a particular group is more or less friendly than a reference person) between pairs of traits and groups. Interestingly, both experiments found a weaker influence of validity/relational information on automatic stereotyping than on non-automatic stereotyping. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on automatic stereotyping.

Perspective taking reduces intergroup bias in visual representations of faces

Intergroup biases shape most aspects of person construal, including lower-level visual representations of group members' faces. Specifically, ingroup members' faces tend to be represented more positively than outgroup members' faces. Here, we used a reverse-correlation paradigm to test whether engaging in perspective taking (i.e., actively imagining another person's mental states) can reduce these biased visual representations. In an initial image-generation experiment, participants were randomly assigned to a minimal group and then composed a narrative essay about an ingroup or an outgroup target person, either while adopting the person's perspective or while following control instructions. Afterward, they generated an image of the person's face in a reverse-correlation image-classification task. Subsequent image-assessment experiments using an explicit rating task, a sequential priming task, and an economic trust game with separate samples of participants revealed that ingroup faces elicited more likability and trustworthiness than did outgroup faces. Importantly, this pattern of intergroup bias was consistently weaker in faces created by perspective takers. Additional image-assessment experiments identified the mouth (i.e., smiling cues) as a critical facial region wherein the interactive effects of group membership and perspective taking emerged. These findings provide initial evidence that perspective taking may be an effective strategy for attenuating, though not for eliminating, intergroup biases in visual representations of what group members look like.

Knowledge About Individuals' Interracial Friendships Is Systematically Associated With Mental Representations of Race, Traits, and Group Solidarity

Individuals with other-race friends are perceived to identify less strongly with their racial in-group than are individuals with same-race friends. Using the reverse-correlation technique, we show that this effect goes beyond perceptions of social identification, influencing how people are mentally represented. In four studies with Black and White American participants, we demonstrate a “racial assimilation effect”: Participants, independent of their own race, represented both Black and White targets with other-race friends as phenotypically more similar to the respective racial out-group. Representations of targets with racial out-group friends were subsequently rated as more likely to engage in social action supportive of the racial out-group. Out-group targets with other-race friends were represented more favorably than out-group targets with mostly same-race friends. White participants had particularly negative representations of in-group members with mostly Black friends. The present research suggests that individuals’ social networks influence how their race and associated traits are mentally represented.

(Eye-) Tracking the Other-Race Effect: Comparison of Eye Movements During Encoding and Recognition of Ingroup Faces With Proximal and Distant Outgroup Faces

People experience difficulties recognizing faces of ethnic outgroups, known as the other-race effect. The present eye-tracking study investigates if this effect is related to differences in visual attention to ingroup and outgroup faces. We measured gaze fixations to specific facial features and overall eye-movement activity level during an old/new recognition task comparing ingroup faces with proximal and distal ethnic outgroup faces. Recognition was best for ingroup faces and decreased gradually for proximal and distal outgroup faces. Participants attended more to the eyes of ingroup faces than outgroup faces, but this effect was unrelated to recognition performance. Ingroup-outgroup differences in eye-movement activity level did not emerge during the study phase, but during the recognition phase, with ingroup-outgroup differences varying as a function of recognition accuracy and old/new effects. Overall, ingroup-outgroup effects on recognition performance and eye movements were more pronounced for recognition of new items, emphasizing the role of retrieval processes.

¡Hola! Nice to Meet You: Language Mixing and Biographical Information Processing

In bilingual communities, social interactions take place in both single- and mixed-language contexts. Some of the information shared in multilingual conversations, such as interlocutors' personal information, is often required in consequent social encounters. In this study, we explored whether the autobiographical information provided in a single-language context is better remembered than in an equivalent mixed-language situation. More than 400 Basque-Spanish bilingual (pre) teenagers were presented with new persons who introduced themselves by either using only Spanish or only Basque, or by inter-sententially mixing both languages. Different memory measures were collected immediately after the initial exposure to the new pieces of information (immediate recall and recognition) and on the day after (delayed recall and recognition). In none of the time points was the information provided in a mixed-language fashion worse remembered than that provided in a strict one-language context. Interestingly, the variability across participants in their sociodemographic and linguistic variables had a negligible impact on the effects. These results are discussed considering their social and educational implications for bilingual communities.

Differences in Explicit Stereotype Activation among Social Groups Based on the Stereotype Content Model: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence in Chinese Sample

The stereotype content model (SCM; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick and Xu, 2002) identifies four basic categories of stereotyped social groups: high warmth-high competence (HW-HC), high warmth-low competence (HW-LC), low warmth-high competence (LW-HC), and low warmth-low competence (LW-LC). However, many of these groups have not been directly examined in stereotype activation research. The purpose of the present research was to extend stereotype activation research to groups that more fully represent those identified under the SCM. Employing explicit sequential priming task, participants responded to prime-target stimulus pairs that were either congruent or incongruent with stereotypes of social groups from all four SCM quadrants in two studies in the current investigation. Study 1 was to determine the behavioral pattern of explicit stereotype activation among four quadrants (the sample included 60 Chinese undergraduate students, 51%-female). Study 2 further employed event-related brain potentials (ERPs) technique to track the time course and electrophysiological underpinnings of explicit stereotype activation (the sample included 22 right-handed Chinese undergraduate students, 76%-female). In Study 1, participants responded more quickly and accurately on stereotype congruent trials than incongruent trials for all social groups except LW-LC groups. This reverse priming effect on LW-LC social groups in RTs was also replicated in Study 2. ERPs findings further showed that incongruent targets elicited larger N400 amplitudes than congruent targets for all four SCM quadrants. Moreover, congruent targets elicited larger P2 than incongruent targets, but only found for the LW-LC social groups. In addition, congruent targets elicited larger amplitudes of late positive component than incongruent targets for the low warmth (LW-LC and LW-HC) groups. Together, these results highlight the unique processing that LW-LC groups receive throughout the cognitive stream, ultimately manifesting in distinctive behavioral responses. Unconscious activation of egalitarian goals, disgust, and distrust accounts are discussed.

Group congruent labelling leads to subjective expansion of time

Given top-down effects on perception, we examined the effect of group identity on time perception. We investigated whether the duration of an ambiguous sound clip is processed differently as a function of group congruent or incongruent source attribution. Group congruent (in-group) and incongruent (out-group) context was created by attributing the source of an identical ambiguous sound clip to Hindu or Muslim festivals. Participants from both the religious groups (Hindus and Muslims) prospectively listened to a 20 s long ambiguous sound clip and reproduced its duration (experiment 1a). Both groups reproduced significantly longer durations when the sound clip was associated with the group congruent compared to the group incongruent festival contexts. The two groups did not differ significantly in reproduced duration when the sound attributed to a non-religious common (busy city street) context (experiment 1b). With multiple durations (1, 5, 10 and 20 s), longer durations were reproduced for group congruent labelling at objectively longer durations (experiment 2). According to the internal clock model of time perception, the significant slope effect indicated that the group congruent context influences temporal experience through changes in pacemaker frequency. We argue that the duration appearing relevant to one's own group is processed differently possibly owing to differences in attentional deployment, which influences the pacemaker frequency.

Fusiform Activity Distinguishes Between Subjects With Low and High Xenophobic Attitudes Toward Refugees

This study analyzes how people's attitudes to the European refugee crisis (ERC) correspond to selected psychological state and trait measures and impact the neural processing of media images of refugees. From a large pool of respondents, who filled in an online xenophobia questionnaire, we selected two groups (total N = 38) with the same socio-demographic background, but with opposite attitudes toward refugees. We found that a negative attitude toward refugees (high xenophobia - HX) was associated with a significantly higher conscientiousness score and with a higher trait aggression and hostility, but there was no group effect connected with empathy, fear, and anxiety measures. At the neural level we found that brain activity during the presentation of ERC stimuli is affected by xenophobic attitudes—with more xenophobic subjects exhibiting a higher BOLD response in the left fusiform gyrus. However, while the fMRI results demonstrate increased attention and vigilance toward ERC-related stimuli in the HX group, they do not show differentiated patterns of brain activity associated with perception of dehumanized outgroup.

The Social Neuroscience of Prejudice

The social neuroscience approach to prejudice investigates the psychology of intergroup bias by integrating models and methods of neuroscience with the social psychology of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. Here, we review major contemporary lines of inquiry, including current accounts of group-based categorization; formation and updating of prejudice and stereotypes; effects of prejudice on perception, emotion, and decision making; and the self-regulation of prejudice. In each section, we discuss key social neuroscience findings, consider interpretational challenges and connections with the behavioral literature, and highlight how they advance psychological theories of prejudice. We conclude by discussing the next-generation questions that will continue to guide the social neuroscience approach toward addressing major societal issues of prejudice and discrimination.

Explicit Categorization Goals Affect Attention-Related Processing of Race and Gender During Person Construal

Faces are categorized by gender and race very quickly, seemingly without regard to perceivers' goals or motivations, suggesting an automaticity to these judgments that has downstream consequences for evaluations, stereotypes, and social interactions. The current study investigated the extent to which early neurocognitive processes involved in the categorization of faces vary when participants' tasks goals were to categorize faces by race or by gender. In contrast to previous findings, task-related differences were found, such that differentiation in the P2 event-related potential (ERP) according to perceived gender was facilitated by having an explicit task goal of categorizing faces by gender; however, the P2 was sensitive to race regardless of task goals. Use of principal components analysis (PCA) revealed two underlying components that comprised the P2 and that were differentially sensitive to the gender and race of the faces, depending on participants' top-down task goals. Results suggest that top-down task demands facilitate discrimination of faces along the attended dimension within less than 200 ms, but that the effect of top-down task demands may not be evident when examining early ERP components that reflect more than one distinct underlying process.

The ABC of society: Perceived similarity in agency/socioeconomic success and conservative-progressive beliefs increases intergroup cooperation

The dimensions that explain which societal groups cooperate more with which other groups remain unclear. We predicted that perceived similarity in agency/socioeconomic success and conservative-progressive beliefs increases cooperation across groups. Self-identified members (N = 583) of 30 society-representative U.S. groups (gays, Muslims, Blacks, upper class, women, Democrats, conservatives etc.) played an incentivized one-time continuous prisoner's dilemma game with one self-identified member of each of these groups. Players knew nothing of each other except one group membership. Consistent with the ABC (agency-beliefs-communion) model of spontaneous stereotypes, perceived self-group similarity in agency and beliefs independently increased expected and actual cooperation across groups, controlling for shared group membership. Similarity in conservative-progressive beliefs had a stronger effect on cooperation than similarity in agency, and this effect of similarity in beliefs was stronger for individuals with extreme (progressive or conservative) compared to moderate beliefs.

Social robotics and the modulation of social perception and bias

The field of social robotics offers an unprecedented opportunity to probe the process of impression formation and the effects of identity-based stereotypes (e.g. about gender or race) on social judgements and interactions. We present the concept of fair proxy communication-a form of robot-mediated communication that proceeds in the absence of potentially biasing identity cues-and describe how this application of social robotics may be used to illuminate implicit bias in social cognition and inform novel interventions to reduce bias. We discuss key questions and challenges for the use of robots in research on the social cognition of bias and offer some practical recommendations. We conclude by discussing boundary conditions of this new form of interaction and by raising some ethical concerns about the inclusion of social robots in psychological research and interventions. This article is part of the theme issue 'From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to human-robot interaction'.

Dynamic interactive theory as a domain-general account of social perception

The perception of social categories, emotions, and personality traits from others' faces each have been studied extensively but in relative isolation. We synthesize emerging findings suggesting that, in each of these domains of social perception, both a variety of bottom-up facial features and top-down social cognitive processes play a part in driving initial perceptions. Among such top-down processes, social-conceptual knowledge in particular can have a fundamental structuring role in how we perceive others' faces. Extending the Dynamic Interactive framework (Freeman & Ambady, 2011), we outline a perspective whereby the perception of social categories, emotions, and traits from faces can all be conceived as emerging from an integrated system relying on domain-general cognitive properties. Such an account of social perception would envision perceptions to be a rapid, but gradual, process of negotiation between the variety of visual cues inherent to a person and the social cognitive knowledge an individual perceiver brings to the perceptual process. We describe growing evidence in support of this perspective as well as its theoretical implications for social psychology.

The effect of ethnicity and team membership on face processing: a cultural neuroscience perspective

In-ethnicity bias, as one of the in-group biases, is widespread in different cultures, interfering with cross-ethnicity communication. Recent studies have revealed that an in-ethnicity bias can be reduced by an in-team bias caused by the membership in a mixed-ethnicity team. However, the neural correlates of different in-group biases are still not clear, especially regarding possible cultural differences. A total of 44 participants (20 Chinese and 24 Germans) were recruited and completed a social categorization fMRI-task, categorizing faces according to their ethnicity and a learned team membership. Our behavioral results revealed both in-ethnicity and in-team bias in German participants, but not in Chinese participants. Our imaging results, however, showed both biases across all participants, as reflected in increased dorsal medial frontal cortex (MFC) activation for in-ethnicity, as well as in-team categorizations, while activation in ventral MFC was higher for in-ethnicity faces in Chinese participants than in the German participants. Our results highlight the importance of the dorsal MFC for in-group categorization across cultures and suggest that cultures might modulate in-group biases.

Seeing Gender: Perceptual Representations of Transgender Individuals

In four studies, we explored perceptual representations of the gender-typicality of transgender individuals. In Studies 1a and 1b, participants ( N = 237) created an avatar based on an image of an individual who disclosed being transgender or did not. Avatars generated in the transgender condition were less gender-typical—that is, transmen were less masculine and transwomen were less feminine—than those created in the control condition. In Study 2 ( N = 368), using a unique visual matching task, participants represented a target labeled transgender as less gender-typical than the same target labeled cisgender. In Study 3 ( N = 228), perceptual representations of transwomen as less gender-typical led to lower acceptability of feminine behavior and less endorsement that the target should be categorized as female. We discuss how biased perceptual representations may contribute to the stigmatization and marginalization of transgender individuals.