Neuroscience of Prejudice and Intergroup Relations

Belle Derks, Daan Scheepers, Naomi Ellemers

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136446023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Psychological research on the origins and consequences of prejudice, discrimination, and stereotyping has moved into previously uncharted directions through the introduction of neuroscientific measures. Psychologists can now address issues that are difficult to examine with traditional methodologies and monitor motivational and emotional as they develop during ongoing intergroup interactions, thus enabling the empirical investigation of the fundamental biological bases of prejudice.

However, several very promising strands of research have largely developed independently of each other. By bringing together the work of leading prejudice researchers from across the world who have begun to study this field with different neuroscientific tools, this volume provides the first integrated view on the specific drawbacks and benefits of each type of measure, illuminates how standard paradigms in research on prejudice and intergroup relations can be adapted for the use of neuroscientific methods, and illustrates how different methodologies can complement each other and be combined to advance current insights into the nature of prejudice.

This cutting-edge volume will be of interest to advanced undergraduates, graduates, and researchers students who study prejudice, intergroup relations, and social neuroscience.

1
The “Nature” of Prejudice

What Neuroscience has to Offer to the Study of Intergroup Relations

Daan Scheepers, Naomi Ellemers, and Belle Derks

Introduction

Since the early 2000s, scholars with an interest in prejudice and intergroup relations have enthusiastically started to incorporate neuroscientific measures in their work (Amodio, 2008; Blascovich, Mendes, & Seery, 2002; Derks, Inzlicht, & Kang, 2008; Prentice & Eberhardt, 2008; Harris & Fiske, 2006; Lieberman, 2007; Van Bavel & Cunningham, 2011). What began as a small set of isolated efforts by a daring few has flourished into a vibrant area of research that has yielded exciting results, surprising conclusions, and intriguing possibilities for further examination. This development has raised curiosity among other scholars with an interest in adopting similar procedures to enhance and develop their own work. Unfortunately, however, it is not so easy to gain a clear picture of advances that have been made in this area of research during the last decade. Due to the rapid developments in this area, much of the empirical work is relatively recent and is published in a broad range of outlets, mostly as reports of separate studies addressing specific research questions. As a result, the broader picture painted by these separate findings and research lines is not always obvious, especially for those not (yet) familiar with the use of neuroscientific techniques.

The present volume aims to cater for those who seek an overview of what can be learned about prejudice and intergroup relations by the introduction of neuroscientific measures. At the same time, the work collected in this volume not only addresses the substantive advancements that have been made in this area of research, but also provides an introduction to the different methodologies that have been developed in this field, the types of questions each may help to address, and the types of challenges researchers face when building a bridge between social psychology and neuroscience.

This chapter first introduces the psychology of prejudice and aims to make a case for how neuroscience and psychophysiological measures might help to deal with some key current issues in this domain of research. We then present a general historic overview of the neuroscience of prejudice, followed by a more specific discussion of how we think this approach has led to new measures, new questions, new answers, but also new challenges for researchers trying to incorporate neuroscience methodology in their work. We conclude this chapter with an overview of the current volume.

Why Examine Prejudice—Still?

Prejudice denotes the tendency to evaluate or judge people negatively before we know them, merely because of their membership in a particular group or social category-based, for instance, on race, gender, or religion (Dovidio, Esses, Glick, & Hewstone, 2010; Nelson, 2009; Stangor, 2000). Two core characteristics of prejudice are its pervasiveness and its complexity. Prejudice is pervasive in the sense that it is of all times, is present in all cultures, and is directed toward all kinds of different groups in society. Prejudice is complex in that it involves explanatory factors at intrapersonal (e.g., biological), interpersonal, intergroup, and cultural levels. However, as we will argue below, it is precisely because of the pervasiveness and complexity of prejudice that more research is needed in this area, and why neuroscience and psychophysiological approaches seem to be particularly needed to shed light on some of the emerging core issues.

Initial analyses of prejudice sought to understand the phenomenon as stemming from a pathological personality (e.g., Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), or as reflecting locally accepted lay explanations (e.g., “racial inferiority”) for differences between specific groups in society (Pettigrew, 1958). In his landmark book, The Nature of Prejudice, Gordon Allport (1958) took a different approach; he explained prejudice as a logical by-product of the categorical thinking that people normally use to deal with complex information (see also Tajfel, 1978). Thus, Allport pointed out that prejudice essentially is a natural phenomenon, and went even as far as to argue that humans are “bundles of prejudice” (Allport, 1958, p. 4). Allport’s early ideas resonate in our current understanding of social cognition, as category-based information is seen to play an important role in the perception and evaluation of specific individuals (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2001; Nelson, 2009).

A Google Scholar search with the terms “psychology” and “prejudice” yields 245,000 hits to scholarly publications on this topic. Surely this suggests that by now we should know all there is to be known about this topic? Indeed, since the late 1970s, theorists and researchers have made great progress in uncovering the psychological mechanisms that lie at the root of prejudice (Bargh, 1999; Bodenhausen & Macrae, 1998; Devine, 1989; Fiske, 2000), and have specified the prejudicial views that are held against different groups and how these can be measured (e.g., sexism, ageism, racism, nationalism; see Dovidio, Glick, & Rudman, 2005; Swim & Stangor, 1998). Other researchers have examined the motivational basis for prejudice (Abrams & Hogg, 1988; Fein & Spencer, 1997; Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and charted the different emotions involved in intergroup discrimination (Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005; Smith & Mackie, 2010). Additional efforts have focused on understanding how prejudice affects relations between individuals and groups in society (Brown, 2010; Levin & Van Laar, 2006; Shelton, Richeson, & Vorauer, 2006); and how the effects of prejudice can be reduced-for instance, through intergroup contact (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2008), or the creation of a common group identity (Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000).

All these efforts have led to the accumulation of evidence for the ubiquitous presence of prejudicial views across different societies and pertaining to different groups, which is in line with Allport’s original conception of prejudice as a fact of life. This realization in turn has inspired social norms, policy guidelines, and formal legislation aiming to counteract the discriminatory implications of prejudicial thinking in terms of unequal outcomes. However, if we take seriously the characterization of prejudice as a natural human phenomenon, such external measures can hardly be expected to have an impact upon the emergence of prejudice itself. Indeed, one of the pernicious effects of societal shifts toward the ideal of equal treatment is that these did not eradicate prejudicial thinking; prejudice simply went underground instead (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986). Admittedly, due to social norms and the desire to communicate in politically correct ways, “modern” expressions of sexism or racism are more masked and subtle (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1996). While this causes such communications to be less easily recognized as prejudicial, the endorsement of these views nevertheless co-varies with more blatant forms of discrimination (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1986). Perhaps more importantly, targets of prejudice tend to suffer just as much, if not more, from exposure to such modern prejudicial views, in part because of the more subtle and veiled nature. Instead of protesting against unequal treatment, they tend to lose self-confidence, start underperforming on important tasks, or slowly disengage from domains that might help them to improve their position in society (Ryan & Branscombe, in press).

Thus, research to date has yielded some highly intriguing (and to an extent disturbing) conclusions. Even if people are aware that they should not hold prejudicial views, or actively try to avoid thinking in these ways, they cannot escape the impact of categorical thinking as a basic cognitive shortcut in social evaluations (Bargh, 1999; Devine, 1989; Dovidio & Gaertner, 1996). Working on the assumption that prejudice cannot simply be evaded through deliberate decision making is the only way forward. However, it is precisely because of the changing (i.e., more subtle) appearance of prejudice-as well as an increased concern with appearing unprejudiced-that less reactive and more implicit measures of prejudice should be employed in order to move this field of research forward. As will become clear below, and in the chapters to follow, neuroscientific and psychophysiological methods form a valuable class of measures that can deal with the difficulty in measuring (subtle) prejudice. As such, these new methods may prove to be crucial in finding ways to reduce the expression of prejudice and its pernicious effects on those targeted by prejudice.

Apart from being pervasive, prejudice is also complex. Recent work in this area consistently points to the multi-layered nature of prejudice, involving the complex interplay between processes at the intrapersonal level (biology, affect [feeling], cognition), the interpersonal level (social judgment, dyadic interactions), the intergroup level (intergroup conflict, social norms), and the cultural level (political ideals, moral values). Of course, in a given situation, not all these processes at all these different levels may be equally important. Nevertheless, prejudice by definition always involves both (intra-)individual as well as social explanatory factors, if only because universal responses to situational contexts or task demands tend to be modified by social concerns having to do with self-presentation, self-protection, and social and cultural norms. Approaching each aspect one at a time— or opting to focus one’s efforts on either one of the endpoints of a biology–culture continuum-impedes a full and complete understanding of these issues (Cacioppo, 2002).

The complexity of prejudice as a phenomenon that connects different levels of analysis also explains why we still do not know all there is to know about it. Recent developments in psychological research have opened up novel ways to study and understand the biological underpinnings of the processes involved at different levels (Amodio, 2008; Blascovich et al., 2002; Harris & Fiske, 2006; Van Bavel & Cunningham, 2011). Connecting these very basic individual factors to their social implications provides us with a new and exciting perspective that helps elucidate the role of prejudice as a factor in intergroup relations.

In summary, both the pervasiveness of prejudice, as well as its complexity explain why there is still a lot to discover about this important phenomenon. The pervasiveness of prejudice—and more, in particular, the fact that its appearance has changed into more subtle forms—motivates the need for more subtle and implicit measures (Dovidio & Gaertner, 1996). The complexity of prejudice illustrates the need to connect different levels of analysis (Cacioppo, 2002) and capitalize on the new insights that can be gained with the social neuroscience approach. The combination of these two features (connecting levels; and offering new, more subtle methodological tools) is precisely what the social neuroscience of prejudice is all about.

The Social Neuroscience of Prejudice

Recently, researchers have begun to address the “nature” of prejudice in a more literal way by exploring the biological and physiological basis of this important phenomenon (Prentice & Eberhardt, 2008). This was inspired at least in part by the realization that more traditional research tools—such as interviews, self-reported attitudes, and behavioral observations—only allow for the examination of more overt and explicit indicators of prejudice. Indeed, prejudicial expectations—more than other attitudes—are subject to (changing) social norms and desired self-views (e.g., appearing unbiased). This is why it was clear that additional measures were needed to gain a more complete understanding of the psychological processes underlying these overt responses. In particular, the interplay between self-presentational concerns on the one hand and the (in)ability to control or suppress prejudice on the other hand became a topic of interest in this field over the last decade. This has led to the development of various implicit cognitive measures, collaboration with cognitive scientists, and the adaptation of some of their standard measures for this purpose. In order to measure people’s implicit intergroup bias, their motivation and ability to control this bias, and the cognitive depletion this causes, prejudice researchers are now using cognitive tasks like the implicit association task, the primed lexical decision task, the flankers task, and the Stroop task (e.g., Bartholow & Dickter, 2008; Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaertner, 2002; Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998).

As a relatively recent outcome of this broader development, researchers of prejudice and intergroup relations have also come to represent a substantial and promising strand in the emerging field of social neuroscience (Cacioppo, Visser, & Pickitt, 2005; Lieberman, 2007). Since the early 2000s, researchers with an interest in these topics have introduced methods like electroencephalography (EEG) and brain imaging techniques (fMRI) to address pre-conscious cognitive and emotional processes related to stereotyping and prejudice (Amodio et al., 2004; Ito & Urland, 2003), and to explain relations between different groups in society (Harris & Fiske, 2006). In addition, efforts have been made to establish how neuroendocrine measures (e.g., cortisol) can be employed to examine threat arising from the devaluation of one’s group (Matheson & Cole, 2004; Mendes, Chapter 16 in this volume). Cardiovascular measures (electrocardiography, blood pressure, impedance cardiography) have become available to assess emotional and motivational states such as threat during inter-ethnic interactions (Mendes, Blascovich, Lickel, & Hunter, 2002) with indicators that also have important implications for psychological and physical well-being (Blascovich, 2008; Blascovich, Spencer, Quinn, & Steele, 2001). The added value of these indicators is clear, because they provide a truly novel perspective on the multi-layered nature of prejudice and its implications for social behavior. Indeed, the contribution that social neuroscience has to offer is of particular benefit for scientists with an interest in prejudice, as the questions they examine speak directly to the interplay between self-presentational concerns guiding overt responses on the one hand, and more automatically occurring or implicit biological processes on the other.

In view of the substantial investment in terms of time and resources that is needed to adapt these complex methodologies for the study of prejudice and intergroup relations, most researchers in this novel area of social neuroscience began their efforts by focusing on one specific type of methodology. The introduction of neuroscientific methods into this area of research is particularly challenging, because there is no natural match between the rich and complex social phenomena in the psychology of prejudice, and the reduced experimental conditions and controlled task settings required for the use of neuroscientific methodologies. It is therefore not surprising that initial efforts were primarily directed at examining whether such methods could even be used as indicators for relevant responses in this area of research (Blascovich et al., 2002; Guglielmi, 1999; Hart et al., 2000; Harris & Fiske, 2...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• 1 The “Nature” of Prejudice What Neuroscience has to Offer to the Study of Intergroup Relations
• Part I Categorization and In-group Favoritism
• Part II Person Perception and Stereotyping
• Part III Overcoming Implicit Prejudice
• Part IV Coping with Prejudice and Identity Threat
• Part V Intergroup Interactions
• Index