Perceiving social injustice during arrests of Black and White civilians by White police officers: An fMRI investigation

Reading the mind in the eyes of Black and White people: Interracial contact and perceived race affects brain activity when inferring mental states

Inferring others' mental states, or mentalizing, is a critical social cognitive ability that underlies humans' remarkable capacity for complex social interactions. Recent work suggests that interracial contact shapes the recruitment of brain regions involved in mentalizing during impression formation. However, it remains unclear how a target's perceived racial group and a perceiver's previous contact with that racial group shapes mental state inferences. In this study, we examined brain activity in regions of interest associated with mentalizing and race perception among self-identified White perceivers who varied in lifetime contact while they inferred secondary emotions from perceived White eyes and perceived Black eyes (i.e., the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test). The interaction between lifetime contact and perceived target race predicted activity in the superior temporal sulcus (STS), a region consistently implicated in mental state inferences from perceptual cues, tracking eye gaze, and biological motion. Low and average contact White perceivers showed more left STS activity when inferring mental states from perceived White eyes than perceived Black eyes, whereas high contact White perceivers showed similar left STS activity regardless of perceived target race. These results indicate that interracial contact decreases racial biases in the recruitment of regions involved in mentalizing when inferring mental states from perceptual cues.

Building a taxonomy of mental processes supporting social functioning to accelerate the integration between psychology and neuroscience: A commentary on Dang et al

A methodological and theoretical chasm continues to exist between social psychology and social neuroscience, particularly with respect to research relevant to understanding racial bias, social justice and inequality. We use the Dang et al. (2022) study to illustrate the challenge of conducting research that lies between these two sub-disciplines. We introduce the idea of an integrative social psychology-social neuroscience research accelerator and a method of how to build it. Pilot testing this accelerator with research relevant to social justice could offer an invaluable contribution to both fields.

Social justice neuroscience, a valuable and complex endeavor: Authors' reply to commentaries on "Perceiving social injustice during arrests of Black and White civilians by White police officers: An fMRI investigation"

In commentaries about our article, "Perceiving social injustice during arrests of Black and White civilians by White police officers: An fMRI investigation" (Dang et al., 2022), Harris (2022), Niv and Kardosh (2022), and Purdie-Greenway and Spagna (2022) made suggestions to increase the generalizability of future research on this topic and cautioned about misinterpretation of the obtained findings. We agree with their assessments, noting that this emerging program of research should be extended to different populations and stimuli. We conclude with a general discussion of the benefits and challenges associated with multidisciplinary research and share our thoughts about engaging in social justice neuroscience.