Social Cognitive Neuroscience of Social Groups

对偏见（及其减少）的心理学研究已经处于社会心理学的前沿超过半个世纪。最近，社会心理学的研究已经被认知神经科学的工作所扩展，这些工作为大脑处理有关社会群体的信息提供了一些证据。围绕这种神经科学方法的兴奋导致了研究发现的爆炸性增长，并已被用于为法律的决策提供信息。然而，这项研究仍然是相对较新的，并且经常提出几乎与它在映射大脑，过程和行为方面回答的问题一样多的问题，如果仅仅是因为在这些背景下大脑结构和功能的知识仍然有些不清楚。例如，虽然杏仁核等区域与社会偏见的某些方面有关，额叶皮层区域与纠正这些偏见有关，但这些区域在社会偏见中扮演的确切角色仍然相对未知。为了帮助解决这些问题，三个功能磁共振成像（fMRI）的研究提出了检查神经过程的基础上两个相互交织的偏见机制。第一种是导致对社会群体进行评价的习得偏见。第二种是将人们归类为内群体而产生的偏好（例如，“我们”）和外群体（例如，在没有任何特定的知识或态度结构的情况下。在每项研究中，参与者将被随机分配到一个既有黑人又有白色成员的小组，并在功能磁共振成像扫描期间呈现这些面孔（沿着新的黑人和白色面孔）。将新群体与已有群体结合使用的优势在于，这使我们能够比较来自新群体的人（人们对新群体没有习得性评价）与来自有习得性评价的群体的人的加工过程。这些研究将有助于更好地理解参与群体感知和评价的基本认知和神经机制-人类社会认知的核心方面。此外，这种对群体处理和社会偏见的方法将推进科学理论，并培养社会心理学和神经科学（特别是神经成像）方面的研究生和本科生。更广泛地说，这项研究将突出群体间偏见的灵活方面，并为政策制定者提供减少群体间偏见的可能方法（例如，种族）偏见。

The psychological study of prejudice (and its reduction) has been at the forefront of social psychology for over a half century. Recently, research in social psychology has been extended by work in cognitive neuroscience that has provided some evidence of the ways in which the brain processes information about social groups. Excitement surrounding this neuroscientific approach has led to an explosion of research findings and has already been used to inform legal decision making. Yet, this research is still relatively new and often times raises nearly as many questions as it answers in mapping brain, process, and behavior if only because knowledge of brain structure and function in these contexts is still somewhat unclear. For example, although regions such as the amygdala have been implicated in certain aspects of social bias, and areas of frontal cortex have been implicated in the correction of these biases, the precise role that these regions play in social bias is still relatively unknown. To help resolve these questions, three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies are proposed to examine the neural processes that underlie two intertwined mechanisms for prejudice. The first is the learned prejudices that give rise to evaluations of social groups. The second is the preferences that develop out of the categorization of people into ingroups (e.g., "us") and outgroups (e.g., "them") in the absence of any particular knowledge or attitude structures. In each study, participants will be randomly assigned to a group that has both Black and White members and will be presented with these faces (along with new Black and White faces) during fMRI scanning. The advantage of using novel groups in conjunction with pre-existing groups is that this allows us to compare the processing of people from novel groups (for which people have no learned evaluations) to the processing of people from groups where there are learned evaluations. These studies will help yield a better understanding of the basic cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in group perception and evaluation - core aspects of human social cognition. In addition, this approach to group processing and social prejudice will advance scientific theory and train graduate and undergraduate students in social psychology and neuroscience (in particular, neuroimaging). More broadly, this research will highlight the flexible aspects of intergroup biases and provide policy makers with possible methods for reducing intergroup (e.g., racial) biases.