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How do humans learn, through social interaction, whom to depend on in different situations? We compared the extent to which inferred trait attributes—as opposed to learned reward associations previously examined in feedback-based learning contexts—could adaptively inform cross-context social decision making. In four experiments, participants completed a novel task in which they chose to “hire” other players to solve math and verbal questions for money. These players varied in their trait-level competence across these contexts, and, independently, in the monetary rewards they offered to participants across contexts. Results revealed that participants chose partners primarily based on context-specific traits, as opposed to either global (e.g., cross-context) trait impressions or material rewards. When making choices in novel contexts—including determining who to choose for social and emotional support—participants generalized trait knowledge from past contexts that required similar traits. Reward-based learning, by contrast, demonstrated significantly weaker context-sensitivity and generalization. These findings suggest that people form context-dependent trait impressions from interactive feedback and use this knowledge to make flexible social decisions. These results support a novel theoretical account of how interaction-based social learning can support context-specific impression formation and adaptive decision making.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multinational data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar results were found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, and collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-neglible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic., PNAS Nexus, 1 (3), ISSN:2752-6542

Social media has become a modern arena for human life, with billions of daily users worldwide. The intense popularity of social media is often attributed to a psychological need for social rewards (likes), portraying the online world as a Skinner Box for the modern human. Yet despite such portrayals, empirical evidence for social media engagement as reward-based behavior remains scant. Here, we apply a computational approach to directly test whether reward learning mechanisms contribute to social media behavior. We analyze over one million posts from over 4000 individuals on multiple social media platforms, using computational models based on reinforcement learning theory. Our results consistently show that human behavior on social media conforms qualitatively and quantitatively to the principles of reward learning. Specifically, social media users spaced their posts to maximize the average rate of accrued social rewards, in a manner subject to both the effort cost of posting and the opportunity cost of inaction. Results further reveal meaningful individual difference profiles in social reward learning on social media. Finally, an online experiment (n = 176), mimicking key aspects of social media, verifies that social rewards causally influence behavior as posited by our computational account. Together, these findings support a reward learning account of social media engagement and offer new insights into this emergent mode of modern human behavior., Despite the popularity of social media, the psychological processes that drive people to engage in it remain poorly understood. The authors applied a computational modeling approach to data from multiple social media platforms to show that engagement can be explained by mechanisms of reward learning.

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.

When economic resources are scarce, racial minorities are often devalued and disenfranchised. We proposed that this pattern extends to visual processing, such that the encoding of minority group faces is disrupted under scarcity-an effect that may facilitate discrimination and contribute to racial disparities. Specifically, we used EEG and fMRI to test whether scarce economic conditions induce deficits in neural encoding of Black faces, and we examined whether this effect is associated with discriminatory resource allocation in behavior. In Study 1, framing resources as scarce (vs. neutral) selectively impaired the neural encoding of Black (vs. White) faces, as indexed by a delayed face-related N170 ERP response, and the degree of this encoding deficit predicted anti-Black allocation decisions. In Study 2, we replicated and extended this effect using fMRI: Resources framed as scarce (vs. neutral) reduced face-sensitive fusiform activity to Black (vs. White) faces. Furthermore, scarcity-decreased fusiform activity to Black faces corresponded with decreased valuation-related striatum activity to predict anti-Black allocation decisions. These findings suggest that impaired visual processing and devaluation occur selectively for minorities under scarcity-an implicit effect that may promote discrimination and contribute to rising disparities observed during economic stress. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

It is widely believed that race divides the world into biologically distinct kinds of people-an essentialist belief inconsistent with reality. Essentialist views of race have been described as early emerging, but this study found that young children (n = 203, Mage = 5.45) hold only the more limited belief that the physical feature of skin color is inherited and stable. Overall, children rejected the causal essentialist view that behavioral and psychological characteristics are constrained by an inherited racial essence. Although average levels of children's causal essentialist beliefs about race were low, variation in these beliefs was related to children's own group membership, exposure to diversity, as well as children's own social attitudes.

For 40 years, research on impression formation and attitudes has relied on dual-process theories that represent knowledge in a single associative network. Although such models explain priming effects and some implicit responses, they are generally silent on other forms of learning and on the interface of social cognition with perception and action. Meanwhile, advances in cognitive neuroscience reveal multiple, interacting forms of learning and memory (e.g., semantic associative memory, Pavlovian conditioning, and instrumental learning), with detailed models of their operations, neural bases, and connections with perceptual and behavioral systems. This memory systems perspective offers a more refined, neurally plausible model of social cognition and attitudes that, I argue, provides a useful and generative account of human social behavior.

Social media has become a modern arena for human life, with billions of daily users worldwide. The intense popularity of social media is often attributed to a psychological need for social rewards (likes), portraying the online world as a Skinner Box for the modern human. Yet despite such portrayals, empirical evidence for social media engagement as reward-based behavior remains scant. Here, we apply a computational approach to directly test whether reward learning mechanisms contribute to social media behavior. We analyze over one million posts from over 4000 individuals on multiple social media platforms, using computational models based on reinforcement learning theory. Our results consistently show that human behavior on social media conforms qualitatively and quantitatively to the principles of reward learning. Specifically, social media users spaced their posts to maximize the average rate of accrued social rewards, in a manner subject to both the effort cost of posting and the opportunity cost of inaction. Results further reveal meaningful individual difference profiles in social reward learning on social media. Finally, an online experiment (n = 176), mimicking key aspects of social media, verifies that social rewards causally influence behavior as posited by our computational account. Together, these findings support a reward learning account of social media engagement and offer new insights into this emergent mode of modern human behavior.

How do societal stereotypes about social groups become internalized as an individual’s own group-based preferences? Although stereotypes are known to create social expectancies, we propose that stereotypes also shape how one experiences and learns from interactions with group members—a process that may induce internalized group-based preferences. In a series of experiments, participants interacted with players from two groups, described with either positive or negative stereotypes, in a reinforcement learning task presented as a money sharing game. Although players’ sharing behaviors were equated between groups, participants formed more positive reward associations with players from positively-stereotyped groups. Computational modeling revealed that stereotypes set participants’ expectancies about group members’ behavior and biased how they learned from player feedback. We then show that these preferences, once formed, spread unwittingly to others who observe these interactions. Finally, we show that this pattern of biased learning and propagation occurs even when the stereotypic message comes from an opposed politician, suggesting that this transmission—from societal stereotypes to personal preferences—may occur despite one’s explicit goals. These findings provide a mechanistic account of how exposure to social stereotypes can transform into personal group-based preferences and spread to others.

How do group-based interaction tendencies form through encounters with individual group members? In three experiments, in which participants interacted with group members in a reinforcement learning task presented as a money sharing game, participants formed instrumental reward associations with individual group members through direct interaction and feedback. Results revealed that individual-level reward learning generalized to a group-based representation, as indicated in self-reported group attitudes, trait impressions, and the tendency to choose subsequent interactions with novel members of the group. Moreover, group-based reward values continued to predict interactions with novel members after controlling for explicit attitudes and impressions, suggesting that instrumental learning contributes to an implicit form of group-based choice. Experiment 3 further demonstrated that group-based reward effects on interaction choices persisted even when group reward value was no longer predicted of positive outcomes, consistent with a habit-like expression of group bias. These results demonstrate a novel process of prejudice formation based on instrumental reward learning from direct interactions with individual group members. We discuss implications for existing theories of prejudice, the role of habit in intergroup bias, and intervention strategies to reduce prejudice.

How do we form impressions of people and groups and use these representations to guide our actions? From its inception, social neuroscience has sought to illuminate such complex forms of social cognition, and recently these efforts have been invigorated by the use of computational modeling. Computational modeling provides a framework for delineating specific processes underlying social cognition and relating them to neural activity and behavior. We provide a primer on the computational modeling approach and describe how it has been used to elucidate psychological and neural mechanisms of impression formation, social learning, moral decision making, and intergroup bias.

© 2017 Elsevier Ltd Successful social relationships require a consideration of a partner's thoughts and intentions. This aspect of social life is captured in the social mindfulness paradigm (SoMi task), in which participants make decisions that either limit or preserve options for their interaction partner's subsequent choice. Here we investigated the neural correlates of spontaneous socially mindful and unmindful behaviours. Functional magnetic resonance data were acquired from 47 healthy adolescents and young adults (age 16–27) as they completed the SoMi task. Being faced with socially relevant choices was associated with activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, caudate, and insula, which is consistent with prior neuroeconomical research. Importantly, socially mindful choices were associated with activity in the right parietal cortex and the caudate, whereas unmindful choices were associated with activity in the left prefrontal cortex. These neural findings were consistent with the behavioural preference for mindful choices, suggesting that socially mindful decisions are the basic inclination, whereas socially unmindful responses may require greater effort and control. Together, these results begin to uncover the neural correlates of socially mindful and unmindful choices, and illuminate the psychological processes involved in cooperative social behaviour.

March, Gaertner, and Olson (this issue) highlight a critical weakness of most contemporary models of attitudes, whereby a valence-based account of attitude associations often fails to map onto patt...

When the economy declines, existing racial disparities typically expand, suggesting that economic scarcity may promote racial discrimination. To understand this pattern, we examined the effect of perceived scarcity on resource allocations to Black and White American recipients, and tested whether this effect depends on a decision maker's motivation to respond without prejudice. We proposed that scarcity would lead to increased discrimination among those with relatively low internal motivation but not those high in internal motivation. Indeed, we found that when resources were framed as scarce (vs. abundant or a control condition), low-motivation participants allocated less to Black than White recipients, whereas high-motivation participants allocated more to Black than White recipients (Studies 1 and 2). This pattern was strongest when decisions could be made deliberatively (Study 3), and anti-Black allocation bias emerged even in a non-zero-sum context (Studies 4 and 5), suggesting a strategic bias directed against Black recipients rather than in favor of White recipients. These findings indicate that the psychological perception of scarcity can produce racial bias in the distribution of economic resources, depending on the motivations of the decision maker-an effect that may contribute to the increase in racial disparities observed during economic stress. (PsycINFO Database Record

Why do essentialist beliefs promote prejudice? We proposed that essentialist beliefs increase prejudice toward Black people because they imply that existing social hierarchies reflect a naturally occurring structure. We tested this hypothesis in three studies ( N = 621). Study 1 revealed that racial essentialism was associated with increased prejudice toward Blacks among both White and Black adult participants, suggesting that essentialism relates to prejudice according to social hierarchy rather than only to group membership. Studies 2 and 3 experimentally demonstrated that increasing essentialist beliefs induced stronger endorsement of social hierarchies in both Black and White participants, which in turn mediated the effect of essentialism on negative attitudes toward Black people. Together, these findings suggest that essentialism increases prejudice toward low-status groups by increasing endorsement of social hierarchies and existing inequality.

Do habits play a role in our social impressions? To investigate the contribution of habits to the formation of social attitudes, we examined the roles of model-free and model-based reinforcement learning in social interactions – computations linked in past work to habit and planning, respectively. Participants in this study learned about novel individuals in a sequential reinforcement learning paradigm, choosing financial advisors who led them to high- or low-paying stocks. Results indicated that participants relied on both model-based and model-free learning, such that each type of learning was expressed in both advisor choices and post-task self-reported liking of advisors. Specifically, participants preferred advisors who could provide large future rewards as well as advisors who had provided them with large rewards in the past. Although participants relied more heavily on model-based learning overall, they varied in their use of model-based and model-free learning strategies, and this individual difference influenced the way in which learning related to self-reported attitudes: among participants who relied more on model-free learning, model-free social learning related more to post-task attitudes. We discuss implications for attitudes, trait impressions, and social behavior, as well as the role of habits in a memory systems model of social cognition.

Do habits play a role in our social impressions? To investigate the contribution of habits to the formation of social attitudes, we examined the roles of model-free and model-based reinforcement learning in social interactions—computations linked in past work to habit and planning, respectively. Participants in this study learned about novel individuals in a sequential reinforcement learning paradigm, choosing financial advisors who led them to high- or low-paying stocks. Results indicated that participants relied on both model-based and model-free learning, such that each independently predicted choice during the learning task and self-reported liking in a post-task assessment. Specifically, participants liked advisors who could provide large future rewards as well as advisors who had provided them with large rewards in the past. Moreover, participants varied in their use of model-based and model-free learning strategies, and this individual difference influenced the way in which learning related to self-reported attitudes: among participants who relied more on model-free learning, model-free social learning related more to post-task attitudes. We discuss implications for attitudes, trait impressions, and social behavior, as well as the role of habits in a memory systems model of social cognition.

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’.

People learn about the world by making choices and experiencing feedback—a process characterized by models of reinforcement learning in which people learn to associate their actions with rewarding outcomes. Although reinforcement models provide compelling accounts of feedback-based learning in nonsocial contexts, social interactions typically involve inferences of others' trait characteristics, which may be independent of their reward value. As a result, people may learn differently about humans and nonhumans through reinforcement. In two experiments (and a pilot study), participants interacted with human partners or slot machines that shared money. Computational modeling of behavior revealed different patterns of learning for humans and non-humans: participants relied more on feedback indicating trait generosity (relative to monetary reward) when learning about humans but relied more on monetary reward (relative to generosity) when learning about slots. Furthermore, this pattern of learning had implications for attitudes: whereas participants preferred generous humans, they preferred rewarding slot machines, relative to their respective counterparts. These findings reveal a distinct role for reinforcement learning in social cognition, showing that humans preferentially form abstract trait inferences about other people through feedback in addition to reward associations.

Four experiments examined the effect of proactive control on expressions of implicit racial bias. Whereas reactive control is engaged in response to a biasing influence (e.g., a stereotype, temptation, or distraction), proactive control is engaged in advance of such biases, functioning to strengthen task focus and, by consequence, limiting the affordance for a bias to be expressed in behavior. Using manipulations of response interference to modulate proactive control, proactive control was found to eliminate expressions of weapons bias, prejudice, and stereotyping on commonly used implicit assessments. Process dissociation analysis indicated that this pattern reflected changes in controlled processing but not automatic associations, as theorized, and assessments of neural activity, using event-related potentials, revealed that proactive control reduces early attention to task-irrelevant racial cues while increasing focus on task-relevant responses. Together, these results provide initial evidence for proactive control in social cognition and demonstrate its effectiveness at reducing expressions of implicit racial bias. Based on these findings and past research, we present a model of proactive and reactive control that offers a novel and generative perspective on self-regulation and prejudice reduction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)

Perceptual and judgment creep Do we think that a problem persists even when it has become less frequent? Levari et al. show experimentally that when the “signal” a person is searching for becomes rare, the person naturally responds by broadening his or her definition of the signal—and therefore continues to find it even when it is not there. From low-level perception of color to higher-level judgments of ethics, there is a robust tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to “creep” when they ought not to. For example, when blue dots become rare, participants start calling purple dots blue, and when threatening faces become rare, participants start calling neutral faces threatening. This phenomenon has broad implications that may help explain why people whose job is to find and eliminate problems in the world often cannot tell when their work is done. Science , this issue p. 1465

We suggest three additional improvements to replication practices. First, original research should include concrete checks on validity, encouraged by editorial standards. Second, the reasons for replicating a particular study should be more transparent and balance systematic positive reasons with selective negative ones. Third, methodological validity should also be factored into evaluating replications, with methodologically inconclusive replications not counted as non-replications.

Social anxiety—the fear of social embarrassment and negative evaluation by others—ranks among people's worst fears, and it is often thought to impair task performance. We investigated the neurocognitive processes through which trait social anxiety relates to task performance, proposing a model of the joint contributions of reactive control, theoretically associated with conflict monitoring and activity of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), and proactive control, theoretically associated with top-down regulation and activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). Participants varying in their degree of trait social anxiety completed the Eriksen flanker task while electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. Task-related left dlPFC activity was indexed by relative left prefrontal EEG (inverse alpha), and conflict-related dACC activity was indexed by the N2r component of the event-related potential. Stronger activity in both regions predicted better response control, and greater social anxiety was associated with worse response control. Furthermore, for all participants, greater left prefrontal EEG activity predicted better behavioral control, but for high social anxiety participants only, greater N2r responses also predicted behavioral control. This pattern suggests that low social anxiety individuals engaged a proactive control process, driven by dlPFC activity, whereas high social anxiety individuals relied additionally on a reactive control process, driven by conflict-related dACC activity. These findings support a model of control that involves different patterns of interplay between proactive and reactive strategies and may help to explain self-regulatory impairments in social anxiety.

Power is known to promote effective goal pursuit, especially when it requires one to overcome distractions or bias. We proposed that this effect involves the ability to engage and implement cognitive control. In Study 1, we demonstrated that power enhances behavioral performance on a response conflict task and that it does so by enhancing controlled processing rather than by reducing automatic processing. In Study 2, we used an event-related potential index of anterior cingulate activity to test whether power effects on control were due to enhanced conflict sensitivity or action implementation. Power did not significantly affect neural sensitivity to conflict; rather, high power was associated with a stronger link between conflict processing and intended action, relative to low power. These findings suggest a new perspective on how social factors can affect controlled processing and offer new evidence regarding the transition between conflict detection and the implementation of action control.

The primary aim of this chapter is to provide a framework to understand and synthesize the processes of person construal—early perceptions that lead to initial ingroup/outgroup categorizations—with the processes involved in intergroup relations. To this end, we review research examining the initial perception and categorization of ingroup and outgroup members and its downstream consequences. We first discuss bottom-up processes in person construal based on visual features (e.g., facial prototypicality and bodily cues), and then discuss how top-down factors (e.g., beliefs, stereotypes) may influence these processes. Next, we examine how the initial categorization of targets as ingroup or outgroup members influences identification, stereotyping, and group-based evaluations, and the relations between these constructs. We also explore the implications of the activation of these constructs for a range of social judgments including emotion identification, empathy, and intergroup behaviors. Finally, we describe a variety of well established and more recent strategies to reduce intergroup bias that target the activation of category-based knowledge, including intergroup contact, approach orientations, evaluative conditioning, and perspective taking.

Ostracism is characterized by a social pain provoked by being excluded and ignored. In order to address the effects of social ostracism in virtual non-physical interactions, we developed a more realistic paradigm as an alternative to Cyberball and assessed its effects on participant's expression of basic social needs, emotional experience and painful feeling. The chat room consisted of controlled social dialogue interactions between participants and two other (confederate) chat room partners. Exclusion was manipulated by varying the number of messages a participant received (15% and 33% in exclusion and inclusion, respectively). Analysis of participant (N = 54) responses revealed that exclusion induced a lower experience of basic-need states and greater anger, compared with included participants. In addition, excluded participants reported higher levels of two specific self-pain feelings, namely tortured and hurt. Our findings suggest that this procedure is effective in inducing social ostracism in a realistic and yet highly controlled experimental procedure.

Power 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.

Racial prejudice is associated with a fundamental distinction between "us" and "them"-a distinction linked to the perceived overlap between representations of the self and others. Implicit prejudice has been shown to reduce the intensity of White individuals' hand ownership sensation as induced by the Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) with dark rubber hands. However, evidence for this link to implicit prejudice comes from self-report questionnaire data regarding the RHI. As an alternative, we assessed the onset time of the RHI. We hypothesized that onset time of the RHI would be higher for the black compared to the white RH, acting as the mediator between implicit prejudice and magnitude of the RH illusion and proprioceptive drift. As expected, participants took longer to incorporate the black RH and presented lower RH illusion magnitude and a smaller proprioceptive drift for the black RH. Mediation analysis revealed a significant indirect effect of implicit racial bias on proprioceptive drift and magnitude of illusion through onset time to illusion only for the black RH. These findings further illuminate the connection between implicit prejudice and embodied perception, suggesting new perspectives on how implicit biases operate., This work was supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico (CNPq; grant numbers: 466922/2014-0 and 401143/2014-7)., info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Despite global increases in diversity, social prejudices continue to fuel intergroup conflict, disparities and discrimination. Moreover, as norms have become more egalitarian, prejudices seem to have 'gone underground', operating covertly and often unconsciously, such that they are difficult to detect and control. Neuroscientists have recently begun to probe the neural basis of prejudice and stereotyping in an effort to identify the processes through which these biases form, influence behaviour and are regulated. This research aims to elucidate basic mechanisms of the social brain while advancing our understanding of intergroup bias in social behaviour.

Although group membership has many privileges, members are expected to reciprocate those privileges. We tested whether in-group members would be punished more harshly than out-group members for marginal fairness norm violations within ultimatum game bargaining interactions. Participants considered monetary splits (of US$20) from in-group and out-group proposers, which ranged in proportion. Accepting an offer yielded the proposed payout; rejecting it caused each player to earn nothing—a punishment of the proposer at a personal cost. Participants exacted stricter costly punishment on racial in-group than out-group members for marginally unfair offers (Study 1), an effect that was replicated with college group membership and magnified among strong in-group identifiers (Study 2). Importantly, ultimatum game decisions were driven by fairness perceptions rather than proposer evaluations (Study 3), suggesting our effects reflected norm enforcement and not esteem preservation. These findings illuminate a previously unexplored process for maintaining group-based norms that may promote in-group favoritism.

Humans learn about people and objects through positive and negative experiences, yet they can also look beyond the immediate reward of an interaction to encode trait-level attributes. We found that perceivers encoded both reward and trait-level information through feedback in an instrumental learning task, but relied more heavily on trait representations in cross-context decisions. Both learning types implicated ventral striatum, but trait learning also recruited a network associated with social impression formation.

article i nfo According to the principle of hypodescent, multiracial individuals are categorized according to their most so- cially subordinate group membership. We investigated whether the tendency to apply this principle is relat- ed to political ideology. In three studies, participants categorized a series of morphed faces that varied in terms of racial ambiguity. In each study, self-reported conservatism (vs. liberalism) was associated with the tendency to categorize ambiguous faces as Black. Consistent with the notion that system justification mo- tivation helps to explain ideological differences in racial categorization, the association between conserva- tism and hypodescent was mediated by individual differences in opposition to equality (Study 2) and was stronger when U.S. participants categorized American than Canadian faces (Study 3). We discuss ways in which the categorization of racially ambiguous individuals in terms of their most subordinate racial group may exacerbate inequality and vulnerability to discrimination.

Faces are inherently social, but the extent to which social group information affects early face processing remains unknown. To address this issue, we examined cortical activity associated with structural encoding of novel ingroup vs. outgroup faces. Participants were assigned to one of two arbitrarily-defined groups using the minimal group procedure, and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants categorized faces of people identified as members of their novel ingroup vs. outgroup. Our analysis focused on the N170 component of the ERP, which peaks 170 ms following face onset and reflects face structural encoding. Ingroup faces elicited larger N170 amplitudes than outgroup faces, suggesting that mere group information affects this initial stage of face perception. These findings show that social categories influence how we “see” faces, thus providing insight into the process through which categorizations may lead to biased intergroup perceptions.

This study examined factors that predicted children's gender intergroup attitudes at age 5 and the implications of these attitudes for intergroup behavior. Ethnically diverse children from low-income backgrounds (N = 246; Mexican-, Chinese-, Dominican-, and African American) were assessed at ages 4 and 5. On average, children reported positive same-gender and negative other-gender attitudes. Positive same-gender attitudes were associated with knowledge of gender stereotypes. In contrast, positive other-gender attitudes were associated with flexibility in gender cognitions (stereotype flexibility, gender consistency). Other-gender attitudes predicted gender-biased behavior. These patterns were observed in all ethnic groups. These findings suggest that early learning about gender categories shape young children's gender attitudes and that these gender attitudes already have consequences for children's intergroup behavior at age 5.

Racial disparities are a major public health concern in the United States. The authors examined whether Black and Latina community members’ perceptions of stigmatization and personal feelings about their group relate to immune and endocrine markers associated with health risk, including the cytokine interleukin-6 (IL-6), which coordinates the immune response to infection, the anabolic hormone dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), which promotes cellular resilience, and the catabolic hormone cortisol, which releases metabolic stores in response to threat. Greater perceived stigmatization was associated with higher basal IL-6, whereas greater ingroup pride was related to elevated basal DHEA. These associations remained with adjustment for general perceived stress, experience with discrimination, age, and income. No significant perceived stigmatization or ingroup pride effects emerged for basal cortisol. These findings provide new evidence that perceived stigmatization and ingroup pride are linked to indicators of ...

How does intergroup anxiety affect the activation of implicit racial evaluations and stereotypes? Given the common basis of social anxiety and implicit evaluative processes in memory systems linked to classical conditioning and affect, we predicted that intergroup anxiety would amplify implicit negative racial evaluations. Implicit stereotyping, which is associated primarily with semantic memory systems, was not expected to increase as a function of intergroup anxiety. This pattern was observed among White participants preparing to interact with Black partners, but not those preparing to interact with White partners. These findings shed new light on how anxiety, often elicited in real-life intergroup interactions, can affect the operation of implicit racial biases, suggesting that intergroup anxiety has more direct implications for affective and evaluative forms of implicit bias than for implicit stereotyping. These findings also support a memory-systems model of the interplay between emotion and cognition in the context of social behavior.

Ideology is a potent motivational force; human beings are capable of committing atrocities (as well as acts of generosity and courage) and sacrificing even their own lives for the sake of abstract belief systems. In this article, we summarize the major tenets of a model of political ideology as motivated social cognition (Jost et al. in Psychol Bull 129:339–375, 2003a, Psychol Bull 129:389–393, 2003b, Person Soc Psychol Bull 33:989–1007, 2007), focusing on epistemic, existential, and relational motives and their implications for left-right (or liberal-conservative) political orientation. We review behavioral evidence indicating that chronically and temporarily activated needs to reduce uncertainty, ambiguity, threat, and disgust are positively associated with conservatism (or negatively associated with liberalism). Studies from neuroscience and genetics suggest that right- (vs. left-) wing orientation is associated with greater neural sensitivity to threat and larger amygdala volume, as well as less sensitivity to response conflict and smaller anterior cingulate volume. These findings and others provide converging evidence for Jost and colleagues’ model of ideology as motivated social cognition and, more broadly, reflect the utility of an integrative political neuroscience approach to understanding the basic cognitive, neural, and motivational processes that give rise to ideological activity.

In middle childhood, many girls go through a curious metamorphosis, in which their earlier embrace of all-things-feminine appears to transform into an identity as a tomboy. We believe this striking shift, observed in girls but not boys, signifies a critical development in children’s socio-cognitive functioning, with implications for their understanding of gender as it relates to their identity and their social relationships. In this article, we review the evidence for this identity shift and present a theoretical account that integrates ideas from social cognition and social development. We argue that this identity shift involves the emergence of public regard and status awareness, with concurrent increases in the complexity with which knowledge associated with gender categories is represented in the mind. We then posit that these changes have important implications for the developmental trajectory of implicit and explicit gender attitudes and stereotypes, and we present a set of predictions generated by our theoretical analysis.

We examined the relation between neural activity reflecting early face perception processes and automatic and controlled responses to race. Participants completed a sequential evaluative priming task, in which two-tone images of Black faces, White faces, and cars appeared as primes, followed by target words categorized as pleasant or unpleasant, while encephalography was recorded. Half of these participants were alerted that the task assessed racial prejudice and could reveal their personal bias (“alerted” condition). To assess face perception processes, the N170 component of the ERP was examined. For all participants, stronger automatic pro-White bias was associated with larger N170 amplitudes to Black than White faces. For participants in the alerted condition only, larger N170 amplitudes to Black versus White faces were also associated with less controlled processing on the word categorization task. These findings suggest that preexisting racial attitudes affect early face processing and that situational factors moderate the link between early face processing and behavior.

Individuals who are primarily internally motivated to respond without prejudice show less bias on implicit measures than individuals who are externally motivated or unmotivated to respond without prejudice. However, it is not clear why these individuals exhibit less implicit bias than others. We used the Quad model to examine motivation-based individual differences in three processes that have been proposed to account for this effect: activation of associations, overcoming associations, and response monitoring. Participants completed an implicit measure of stereotyping (Study 1) or racial attitudes (Study 2). Modeling of the data revealed that individuals who were internally (but not externally) motivated to respond without prejudice showed enhanced detection and reduced activation of biased associations, suggesting that these processes may be key to achieving unbiased responding. © 2011 by the Society for Personalityand Social Psychology, Inc.

Implicit social cognition refers to the mental processes that influence social perception and behavior independently of conscious awareness. To date, implicit social processes have been explained by single-system models of associations among concepts that, while addressing questions of information processing, are generally silent regarding the interface of implicit social processes with behavior. In this article, we present a multisystem model of implicit social cognition based on emerging cognitive neuroscience research on systems of learning and memory. This model describes how different underlying memory systems, characterized by different patterns of learning, unlearning, and behavioral expression, may contribute to implicit social processes. We describe how the memory systems model differs from previous theories of implicit social cognition and how it makes new and increasingly refined predictions regarding implicit sociocognitive processes and their influences on behavior.

Social neuroscience is a young and thriving area of research in psychology that integrates diverse literatures and methodologies to address broad questions about the brain and behavior. But despite the excitement and activity generated by this approach, its contribution to ideas in social psychology is sometimes questioned. This article discusses the ways in which social neuroscience research may or may not contribute to theoretical issues in social psychology. Still a young field, much research in this area has focused on issues of brain mapping and methodological development, with less emphasis on generating and testing novel social psychological hypotheses. The challenges to theoretical advancement, including psychometric and methodological issues, are considered, and a set of guidelines for conducting theoretically-informative social neuroscience is offered. In the final analysis, it is argued that neuroscience has much to offer to social psychology, both theoretically and methodologically, but that l...

To celebrate the first 10 years of Nature Reviews Neuroscience, we invited the authors of the most cited article of each year to look back on the state of their field of research at the time of publication and the impact their article has had, and to discuss the questions that might be answered in the next 10 years. This selection of highly cited articles provides interesting snapshots of the progress that has been made in diverse areas of neuroscience. They show the enormous influence of neuroimaging techniques and highlight concepts that have generated substantial interest in the past decade, such as neuroimmunology, social neuroscience and the 'network approach' to brain function. These advancements will pave the way for further exciting discoveries that lie ahead. © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.

Anxiety associated with an intergroup interaction is often thought to interfere with the cognitive control of automatic racial stereotypes. However, this link remains elusive, as self-reported anxiety is not typically associated with assessments of control. The present research tested a neuroendocrine model for how intergroup anxiety may affect controlled processing. White participants met with a Black or White interviewer to discuss their racial attitudes and to complete a measure of stereotype inhibition. Baseline and post-interaction assessments of self-reported anxiety and salivary cortisol were obtained. Although self-reported anxiety was heightened for participants in the Black interviewer condition, it was not associated with control on the stereotyping task. Rather, greater cortisol reactivity to the interracial interaction predicted reduced controlled processing. This pattern was not observed in the White interviewer condition. Implications for theories of intergroup anxiety, self-regulation, and resource depletion are discussed.

This investigation considered possible health-related neurobiological processes associated with "emotional approach coping" (EAC), or intentional efforts to identify, process, and express emotions surrounding stressors. It was hypothesized that higher dispositional use of EAC strategies would be related to neural activity indicative of greater trait approach motivational orientation and to lower proinflammatory cytokine and cortisol responses to stress. To assess these relationships, 46 healthy participants completed a questionnaire assessing the two components of EAC (i.e., emotional processing and emotional expression), and their resting frontal cortical asymmetry was measured using electroencephalography (EEG). A subset (N=22) of these participants' levels of the soluble receptor for tumor necrosis factor-alpha (sTNFalphaRII), interleukin-6 (IL-6), and cortisol (all obtained from oral fluids) were also assessed before and after exposure to an acute laboratory stressor. Consistent with predictions, higher reported levels of emotional expression were significantly associated with greater relative left-sided frontal EEG asymmetry, indicative of greater trait approach motivation. Additionally, people who scored higher on EAC, particularly the emotional processing component, tended to show a less-pronounced TNF-alpha stress response. EAC was unrelated to levels of IL-6 and cortisol. Greater left-sided frontal EEG asymmetry was significantly related to lower baseline levels of IL-6 and to lower stress-related levels of sTNFalphaRII, and was marginally related to lower stress-related levels of IL-6. The findings suggest that the salubrious effects of EAC strategies for managing stress may be linked to an approach-oriented neurocognitive profile and to well-regulated proinflammatory cytokine responses to stress.

The social neuroscience approach integrates theories and methods of social psychology and neuroscience to address questions about social behaviour at multiple levels of analysis. This approach has been especially popular in the domain of intergroup relations, in part because this area of research provides a rich context for connecting basic neurocognitive mechanisms to higher-level interpersonal, group, and societal processes. Here I provide a brief description of the social neuroscience approach, and then review research that has used this approach to advance theories of (a) implicit racial bias and their effects on behaviour, (b) the self-regulation of intergroup responses, and (c) prejudice reduction. I also describe how the social neuroscience perspective suggests some important refinements to theoretical conceptions of implicit bias, prejudice control, and prejudice reduction.