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，这一现象称为去个性化。去个人化助长了基于群体的歧视，增加了社会不平等。例如，白人目击者将黑人误认为肇事者的比率比白人高得多，这导致黑人个人被错误定罪的比例更大。这项研究测试了低水平的感知和神经认知机制如何更快地习惯于其他种族的个体，作为同一大类的重复实例，但不太习惯于自己的种族目标，从而导致对组内成员的更好认同的局限性和可塑性。特别是，这项研究测试了不同情感状态下的这些过程，以测试恐惧如何影响面孔识别过程。它还测试了威胁和从属关系线索如何影响识别过程。了解大脑是如何“看到”种族外群体成员的，对于帮助减少美国基于种族的差异和结果很重要。这项研究使用行为、生理和神经成像实验来检验人的知觉过程中的知觉偏差的后果。研究表明，与组内面孔相比，组外面孔的面孔选择加工有更粗的神经调节。这导致对种族外群的认知度低于对内群的认知度。这项研究测试了这些知觉偏差，它们的灵活性，以及它们是否可以被消除。一系列研究考察了将种族外群体成员在认知上去个人化是否会导致人们在广泛的外群体成员中泛化恐惧。具体地说，这项研究测试了与一名外部群体成员一起经历厌恶事件会在多大程度上引发与其他看起来或多或少与该目标相似的人的恐惧反应。另一系列研究考察了大脑对黑人或白人面孔群体的习惯程度，测试知觉上的偏见是固定的，还是取决于情绪或上级群体成员的灵活性。最后一项研究结合了这些方法，以测试对抗群体偏见的干预措施是否可以防止恐惧在外部群体成员中传播。这项研究与偏见和歧视的形成有直接关系，并最终可以解决目击证人程序。这一裁决反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力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.