Social Cognitive Neuroscience of Social Groups

半个多世纪以来，对偏见的心理学研究（及其减少）一直处于社会心理学的前沿。最近，认知神经科学的研究扩展了社会心理学的研究，提供了一些大脑处理社会群体信息的方式的证据。围绕这种神经科学方法的兴奋导致了研究成果的爆炸式增长，并已被用于法律决策。然而，这一研究仍然相对较新，并且经常在绘制大脑，过程和行为方面提出几乎与它回答的问题一样多的问题，如果只是因为在这些背景下对大脑结构和功能的了解仍然有些不清楚。例如，尽管杏仁核等区域与社会偏见的某些方面有关，额叶皮质区域也与纠正这些偏见有关，但这些区域在社会偏见中所起的确切作用仍然相对未知。为了帮助解决这些问题，三个功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）研究被提出，以检查神经过程背后的两个相互交织的机制偏见。第一种是后天习得的偏见，它产生了对社会群体的评价。第二种是在没有任何特定知识或态度结构的情况下，将人们分为内部群体（例如，“我们”）和外部群体（例如，“他们”）而产生的偏好。在每项研究中，参与者将被随机分配到一个既有黑人成员也有白人成员的小组，并在fMRI扫描期间向他们展示这些面孔（以及新的黑人和白人面孔）。将新群体与已有群体结合使用的好处是，这使我们能够比较来自新群体（人们没有习得评价）的人的处理过程与来自有习得评价的群体的人的处理过程。这些研究将有助于更好地理解群体感知和评价的基本认知和神经机制，这是人类社会认知的核心方面。此外，这种研究群体加工和社会偏见的方法将促进科学理论的发展，并培养社会心理学和神经科学（特别是神经影像学）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，并为决策者提供减少群体间（如种族）偏见的可能方法。

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.