Testing the impact and malleability of neural biases in outgroup deindividuation

人们倾向于将自己种族群体的成员视为个体，而将其他种族群体的成员视为可互换和模糊的，这种现象被称为去个性化。去个性化促进了基于群体的歧视，加剧了社会不平等。例如，白人目击者错认黑人为肇事者的比例比白人高得多，这导致黑人中错误定罪的比例更高。这项研究测试了低水平感知和神经认知机制的局限性和可塑性，即作为同一大类的重复实例，如何更快地适应其他种族的个体，但对本种族目标的适应程度较低，从而更好地识别群体内成员。特别是，本研究在不同的情感状态下测试这些过程，以测试恐惧如何影响面部识别过程。它还测试了威胁和隶属线索如何影响识别过程。了解大脑如何“看待”种族外群体成员，对于帮助减轻美国基于种族的差异和结果非常重要。本研究使用行为、生理和神经成像实验来检验知觉偏差在人的知觉过程中所产生的后果。研究表明，与群内面孔相比，群外面孔的面孔选择加工具有更粗的神经调节。这导致人们对种族外群体的认识不如对种族内群体的认识。这项研究测试了这些感知偏差，它们的灵活性，以及它们是否可以被消除。一系列的研究考察了在感知上去个体化种族外群体成员是否会导致人们将恐惧泛化到更大范围的外群体成员身上。具体来说，这项研究测试了与一个外群体成员一起经历厌恶事件的人，会在多大程度上对其他与该目标或多或少相似的人产生类似的恐惧反应。另一系列研究考察了大脑对一组黑人或白人面孔的适应程度，测试了感知上的偏见是固定的，还是根据情绪或上级群体成员的不同而灵活的。最后一项研究将这些方法结合起来，以测试对抗群体偏见的干预措施是否能防止恐惧在群体外成员中传播。这项研究与偏见和歧视的形成直接相关，最终可以解决目击过程。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

People tend to see members of their own racial groups as individuals but consider members of other racial groups as interchangeable and indistinct, a phenomenon known as deindividuation. Deindividuation facilitates group-based discrimination and increases social inequality. For example, White eyewitnesses misidentify Black individuals as perpetrators at a much higher rate than White, which results in a larger proportion of wrongful convictions among Black individuals. This research tests the limits and malleability of how low-level perceptual and neurocognitive mechanisms habituate more quickly to other-race individuals as repeated instances of the same broad category, but habituate less to own-race targets, leading to better identification for ingroup members. In particular, this research tests these processes across different affective states to test how fear influences face identification processes. It also tests how threat and affiliation cues influence identification processes. Understanding how the brain “sees” racial outgroup members is important to help mitigate race-based disparities and outcomes in the United States. This research uses behavioral, physiological and neuroimaging experiments to examine the consequences of perceptual biases involved in person perception processes. Research shows that there is coarser neural tuning of face selective processing for outgroup faces compared to ingroup faces. This results in poorer recognition for racial outgroups than ingroups. This research tests these perceptual biases, their flexibility, and whether they can be eliminated. One series of studies examines whether deindividuating racial outgroup members in perception can lead people to generalize fear across a wide range of outgroup members. Specifically, this research tests the degree to which experiencing an aversive event paired with one outgroup member elicits a similar fear response to other individuals who look more or less similar to that target. Another series of studies examines the extent to which the brain habituates to groups of Black or White faces, testing whether biases in perception are fixed, or flexible depending on emotion or superordinate group membership. A final study combines these approaches to test whether interventions that combat group biases can prevent the spread of fear across outgroup members. This research has direct relevance for the formation of prejudice and discrimination, and can eventually address eye-witness processes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.