A study suggests that people's individualization of their own racial ingroup and homogenization of racial outgroups may arise from early stages of perception. The tendency to view members of one's own racial group as individuals while considering those in other groups categorically is a hallmark of racial stereotyping and bias. The root of this tendency, whether learned or innate, is poorly understood. Brent Hughes, Nicholas Camp, Jennifer Eberhardt, and colleagues explored brain activity when viewing ingroup and outgroup faces by performing functional MRI scans on 20 white participants, around 20 years of age. In 3 experimental tasks, participants evaluated similarities between faces that gradually changed from identical to different. In all 3 tasks, participants viewed black faces as more similar to each other than white faces, due to an elevated threshold for detecting differences between faces. The scans showed that the brain's face-selective cortex displayed more gradual and overall reduced activation when viewing outgroup faces than when viewing ingroup faces, suggesting that at the earliest stages of face processing, neurons are more finely-tuned to differences between ingroup faces and may process outgroup faces as repeated instances of the same social category. According to the authors, the roots of racial stereotyping may begin in early perception processes.
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Article #18-22084: "Neural adaptation to faces reveals racial outgroup homogeneity effects in early perception," by Brent L. Hughes, Nicholas P. Camp, Jesse Gomez, Vaidehi S. Natu, Kalanit Grill-Spector, and Jennifer L. Eberhardt.
MEDIA CONTACT: Brent Hughes, University of California, Riverside, CA; tel: 512-364-6074; e-mail: <bhughes@ucr.edu>
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences