Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization

Bias in perceptual learning

Perceptual learning is commonly understood as conferring some benefit to the learner, such as allowing for the extraction of more information from the environment. However, perceptual learning can be biased in several different ways, some of which do not appear to provide such a benefit. Here we outline a systematic framework for thinking about bias in perceptual learning and discuss how several cases fit into this framework. We argue these biases are compatible with an understanding in which perceptual learning is beneficial, but that its benefits are tied to both a person's narrow interests and the training environment or domain, and so if there are changes to either of these, then benefits can turn into liabilities, though these are often temporary. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Learning Philosophy > Value Linguistics > Language Acquisition.

Racial categorization and intergroup perception in preschool children: A focus on group membership and group size in the French context

In the current study, we explored how context influences intergroup perception in 3- to 6-year-old children (N = 242; Mage = 55.5 months, SD = 9.94) in France. We examined the impact of participants' group membership (belonging to a high- vs. low-social-status group) and their group size on the development of racial categorization and the perception of cultural distance. Children completed two tasks using photographs depicting children from the three most represented racial groups in France: Caucasians, Black Africans, and North Africans. In the first task, the free categorization task, they were asked to group photographs of children they thought belonged together. Results revealed that as children grew older, they increasingly grouped children based on their race. In addition, high-social-status (nonmarginalized) children categorized more based on race than low-social-status children. In a second task, children were requested to rate the same photographs on a 5-point Likert scale for perceived cultural distance in three criteria: music, eating habits, and language. Results showed that regardless of their own group membership, children perceived photos representing children of color (North and Black Africans) as culturally more distant than White children on all criteria. However, this bias was not observed in schools where groups have equal numerical status, suggesting a positive impact of environments where groups are numerically equal.

Terrorism as Coalitional Predation: Explaining Definitional Ambiguities and Precautionary Responses

Terrorism continues to be an enigmatic and contested concept, lacking a universally accepted definition despite extensive scholarly debate. Lay intuitions, however, demonstrate a notable convergence in identifying acts as "terrorism" when specific situational features are present, such as indiscriminate violence and out-group perpetration. These features elicit predictable and robust precautionary responses, raising the question: Is there a unified and parsimonious explanation for these phenomena? It is hypothesized that a situational template exists in the human mind, the coalitional predation template (CPT), which evolved not to detect modern-day terrorism, per se, but to identify and respond to situations of predatory coalitional conflict. The paper examines the potential cues and mechanisms that constitute the psychological systems activated by such threats, suggesting that matching the input cues of the CPT triggers well-documented precautionary responses to terrorism. However, this cue-based system may not align neatly with contemporary threats, leading to disproportionate responses to some threats while underestimating others. The model also posits that interpretations of violence can vary due to incomplete cues and the social position of the evaluator, leading to public disagreements and inconsistencies in defining terrorism. Consequently, arriving at an unambiguous and widely accepted definition of terrorism may not be possible. The model presented may account for a range of phenomena, including the inclination towards attributing mental illness to particular violent incidents and the uncanny surface similarities between terrorism and war crimes. The findings have significant implications for both the theoretical understanding of terrorism and practical policy responses.

Social Categorization of Sexual Orientation via Verbal Cues: Evidence From a "Who Said What?" Study

Even though an abundant amount of research has demonstrated the ability to identify others' sexual orientation via minimal nonverbal cues, few studies, if any, have investigated the role of verbal information sources on the social cognition of sexual orientation. Herein, we aimed to explore whether verbal cues (gendered names) are adequate for triggering social categorization processes. Additionally, whether participant gender, target gender, and attributions toward homosexual targets differentiate sexual orientation-based categorization was examined. Our data showed that (1) participants categorized targets based on sexual orientation via semantic information, (2) female participants' categorization tendencies were marginally stronger than the males', and (3) negative attributions toward homosexual targets did not influence the categorization levels. Accordingly, the results contribute to the existing literature indicating the automatic detection of sexual orientation and clarify that perceivers not only use numerous nonverbal sources to extract categorical information about sexual orientation but also verbal cues.

Cultural technologies for peace may have shaped our social cognition

Peace, the article shows, is achieved by culturally evolved institutions that incentivize positive-sum relationships. We propose that this insight has important consequences for the design of human social cognition. Cues that signal the existence of such institutions should play a prominent role in detecting group membership. We show how this accounts for previous findings and suggest avenues for future research.

Impediments to peace

While effective institutional practices are critical for the evolution of peace certain factors deter their effectiveness. In-group and out-group dynamics may make peace difficult between culturally distinct groups. Critical ecological conditions often lead to intractable conflict over resources. And within group conflicts of interest most prominently between generations may inhibit effective peace making.

Same people, different group: Social structures are a central component of group concepts

We examine whether people conceptualize organized groups as having at least two parts: In addition to members (e.g., Alice), they also have social structures (i.e., roles and relations). If groups have members and social structures, then numerically distinct groups can have the same members if they differ in their structures. In Studies 1-4, participants numerically distinguished groups that had the same members when they had different structures. Participants numerically distinguished even when groups had the same function-the same people playing chess together Monday and Tuesday can be numerically distinct groups. In Study 4, we compare clubs to tables, and find that participants numerically distinguish tables by their structures too (i.e., the configuration of their parts) even when they have the same parts (which can be disassembled and then reassembled with ease). In Study 5, we find that participants rate groups as existing in space and time like concrete objects, suggesting that participants represent groups as at least partially concrete, such that groups have at least two parts (their structures and their members). Finally, in Study 6, we show that people will judge the same person as exemplary with respect to one group but condemnable with respect to another-even when those groups have the same members.

Do American children automatically encode cues to wealth?

As adults, we readily notice markers of social status and wealth and draw conclusions about individuals based on these cues. Do children do the same? Using a "Who Said What?" task across 5- to 9-year-old American children (n = 159; Mage = 7.44 years; 51.6% female, 47.2% male, 1.2% nonconforming or not provided; 59.1% White, 23.3% racial-ethnic minority, 17.6% not provided) and adults (n = 182; 84.1% female, 13.7% male, 2.2% nonconforming or not provided; 54.9% White, 44.5% racial-ethnic minority, 0.6% not provided), we found that both children and adults automatically encode (i.e., spontaneously notice and remember) occupational cues (i.e., work attire) and quantitative cues (i.e., amount of money) to wealth but that only adults automatically encode qualitative cues to wealth (i.e., car quality), suggesting developmental changes in which types of cues to wealth are most salient. Furthermore, automatic encoding in children was sensitive to contextual factors; children from communities with less affluence and higher rates of unemployment were more likely to encode some wealth cues than their peers from more affluent and employed communities. Finally, from 5 to 7 years of age, children began to draw connections between wealth cues, using occupational cues to make inferences about the quantity and quality of others' possessions. This research highlights the changing salience of wealth cues across development and suggests that even young children are likely to notice economic inequality and thus to be ready for conversations about inequality, as well as the origins of inequality, at an earlier age than previously supposed.

Differences in Implicit Attitudes in West and East Germans as Measured by the Go/NoGo Association Task and Event-related EEG Potentials

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Implicit social cognition refers to attitudes and stereotypes that may reside outside conscious awareness and control but that still affect human behavior. In particular, the implicit favoritism of an ingroup, to which an individual belongs, as opposed to an outgroup, to which the individual does not belong, characterized as ingroup bias, is of interest and is investigated here.

METHOD

We used a Go/NoGo association task (GNAT) and behavioral and electroencephalographic (event-related EEG potential [ERP] analysis) measures to investigate the implicit bias toward cities in East Germany, West Germany, and Europe, in 16 individuals each from West and East Germany (mixed gender, M age = 24). The GNAT assesses an individual's Go and NoGo responses for a given association between a target category and either pole (positive or negative) of an evaluative dimension.

RESULTS

Behavioral measures revealed slightly faster reaction times to the combination of European city names and negative, as compared with positive, evaluative words in both groups. ERP analysis showed an increased negativity at 400-800 ms poststimulus in the incongruent conditions of East German city/positive word pairings (in West Germans) and West German city/positive word pairings (in East Germans).

CONCLUSION

An implicitly moderately negative evaluation of Europe by both groups was exhibited based on the behavioral data, and an increased level of conflict arising from the "incongruent" pairings (ie, as manifestation of an implicitly negative attitude toward East Germany in West Germans, and toward West Germany in East Germans) was exhibited based on the electrophysiological data.

Linguistic identity as a modulator of gaze cueing of attention

Eye-gaze stimuli can elicit orienting of attention in an observer, a phenomenon known as gaze cueing of attention. Here, we explored whether gaze cueing can be shaped by the linguistic identity of the cueing face. In two experiments, participants were first familiarized with different faces together with auditory sentences. Half of the sentences were associated with the native language of the participants (Italian) and the other half with an unknown language (Albanian and Basque, in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively). In a second phase, participants performed a gaze-cueing task. In a third recognition phase, the auditory sentences were presented again, and participants were required to decide which face uttered each sentence. Results indicated that participants were more likely to confuse faces from the same language category than from the other language category. Results of the gaze-cueing task revealed a greater gaze-cueing effect for faces associated with the native vs. unknown language. Critically, this difference emerged only in Experiment 1, which may reflect differences in social status between the two language groups. Our findings revealed the impact of language as a social cue on the gaze-cueing effect, suggesting that social attention is sensitive to the language of our interlocutors.

Neural representation of perceived race mediates the opposite relationship between subcomponents of self-construals and racial outgroup punishment

Outgroup aggression characterizes intergroup conflicts in human societies. Previous research on relationships between cultural traits and outgroup aggression behavior showed inconsistent results, leaving open questions regarding whether cultural traits predict individual differences in outgroup aggression and related neural underpinnings. We conducted 2 studies to address this issue by collecting self-construal scores, EEG signals in response to Asian and White faces with painful or neutral expressions, and decisions to apply electric shocks to other-race individuals in a context of interracial conflict. We found that interdependent self-construals were well explained by 2 subcomponents, including esteem for group (EG) and relational interdependence (RI), which are related to focus on group collectives and harmonious relationships, respectively. Moreover, EG was positively associated with the decisions to punish racial outgroup targets, whereas RI was negatively related to the decisions. These opposite relationships were mediated by neural representations of perceived race at 120-160 ms after face onset. Our findings highlight the multifaceted nature of interdependent self-construal and the key role of neural representations of race in mediating the relationships of different subcomponents of cultural traits with racial outgroup punishment decisions in a context of interracial conflict.

Oxytocin attenuates racial categorization in 14-month-old infants

Intergroup bias - the preferential attitudes one holds towards one's social group - is a ubiquitous socio-cognitive phenomenon. In fact, studies show that already in the first months of life, infants manifest a preference for members of their own social group. This points to the possibility of inborn mechanisms involved in social group cognition. Here we assess the effect of a biological activation of infants' affiliative motivation on their social categorization capacity. In a first visit to the lab, mothers self-administered either Oxytocin (OT) or placebo (PL) via a nasal spray and then engaged in a face-to-face interaction with their 14-month-old infants, a procedure previously shown to increase OT levels in infants. Infants then performed a racial categorization task presented on an eye-tracker. Mothers and infants returned a week later and repeated the procedure while self-administering the complementary substance (i.e., PL or OT, respectively). In total, 24 infants completed the two visits. We found that whereas infants in the PL condition on the first visit exhibited racial categorization, infants in the OT condition in their first visit did not. Moreover, these patterns remained a week later despite the change in substance. Thus, OT inhibited racial categorization when infants first encountered the to-be-categorized faces. These findings highlight the role of affiliative motivation in social categorization, and suggest that the neurobiology of affiliation may provide insights on mechanisms that may be involved in the downstream prejudicial consequences of intergroup bias.

Understanding preferences in infancy

A preference is defined as a dispositional state that helps explain why a person chooses one option over another. Preference understanding is a significant part of interpreting and predicting others' behavior, which can also help to guide social encounters, for instance, to initiate interactions and even form relationships based on shared preferences. Cognitive developmental research in the past several decades has revealed that infants have relatively sophisticated understandings about others' preferences, as part of investigations into how young children make sense of others' behavior in terms of mental states such as intentions, dispositions including preferences, and epistemic states. In recent years, research on early psychological knowledge expands to including infant understanding of social situations. As such, infants are also found to use their preference understandings in their social life. They treat favorably others who share their own preferences, and they prefer prosocial and similar others (e.g., those who speak their language). In reviewing these results, we point out future directions for research and conclude with further suggestions and recommendations. This article is categorized under: Cognitive Biology > Cognitive Development Psychology > Development and Aging.

Construal level mindsets modulate gender categorizations in preschool children

Social categorization is a crucial information processing strategy that adults deliberately adjust depending on goals and situational requirements. This study investigated whether flexibility in categorization is similarly present among preschool children. More specifically, we tested whether spontaneous gender categorizations are more pronounced for children with a situationally induced abstract compared to concrete construal level mindset. Sixty-one children first participated in a construal mindset induction task before completing a visual variant of the "who said what" memory task. Systematic memory confusions indicated that all children engaged in gender-based social categorization but that this tendency was accentuated in the abstract compared to concrete mindset condition. These results suggest an ability of children to modulate social categorizations. Implications for the development of intergroup biases are discussed.

The developmental trajectories of racial and gender intergroup bias in 5- to 10-year-old children: The impact of general psychological tendencies, contextual factors, and individual propensities

Racism and intergroup discrimination are pervasive problems in human societies. Whereas several studies have shown that children show bias in the context of many kinds of groups, much less is known about how and when general psychological tendencies and contextual factors contribute to the manifestation of intergroup bias across development, and whether individual differences play a role. In the present study, we pursue these questions by investigating and comparing the developmental trajectories of intergroup bias in 5- to 10-year-old (mostly) White children (n = 100). We assessed children's liking and preferences towards 4 racial groups (White, East Asian, Black, and Middle Eastern) and towards 2 gender groups (male and female) in a within-subject design. We found that the young children in our sample showed a significant racial and gender ingroup bias, speaking to an early and strong manifestation of intergroup bias on the basic ingroup-outgroup distinction. This bias decreased with age. At the same time, we found considerable differences between the different types of outgroups from early on. Furthermore, there were remarkable differences between the developmental trajectories of gender and racial intergroup bias, highlighting the role of both social and contextual influences. Finally, our results did not reveal consistent evidence for the influence of individual differences on children's intergroup bias.

Which group matters more: The relative strength of minimal vs. gender and race group memberships in children's intergroup thinking

Experimentally created "minimal" social groups are frequently used as a means to investigate core components of intergroup cognition in children and adults. Yet, it is unclear how the effects of such arbitrary group memberships compare to those of salient real-world group memberships (gender and race) when they are directly pitted against each other in the same studies. Across three studies, we investigate these comparisons in 4-7-year-olds. Study 1 (N = 48) establishes the minimal group paradigm, finding that children develop ingroup preferences as well as other forms of group-based reasoning (e.g., moral obligations) following random assignment to a minimal group. Study 2 (N = 96) and Study 3 (N = 48) directly compare this minimal group to a real-world social group (gender or race) in a cross-categorization paradigm, in which targets are participants' ingroups in terms of the minimal group and outgroups in terms of a real-world social group, or vice versa. The relative strength of the minimal group varies, but in general it either has a similar effect or a stronger effect as compared to race and in some cases even gender. Our results support the contention that an abstract tendency to divide the world into "us" and "them" is a central force in early intergroup cognition.

Triadic conflict "primitives" can be reduced to welfare trade-off ratios

Pietraszewski proposes four triadic "primitives" for representing social groups. We argue that, despite surface differences, these triads can all be reduced to similar underlying welfare trade-off ratios, which are a better candidate for social group primitives. Welfare trade-off ratios also have limitations, however, and we suggest there are multiple computational strategies by which people recognize and reason about social groups.

Why Antibias Interventions (Need Not) Fail

There is a critical disconnect between scientific knowledge about the nature of bias and how this knowledge gets translated into organizational debiasing efforts. Conceptual confusion around what implicit bias is contributes to misunderstanding. Bridging these gaps is the key to understanding when and why antibias interventions will succeed or fail. Notably, there are multiple distinct pathways to biased behavior, each of which requires different types of interventions. To bridge the gap between public understanding and psychological research, we introduce a visual typology of bias that summarizes the process by which group-relevant cognitions are expressed as biased behavior. Our typology spotlights cognitive, motivational, and situational variables that affect the expression and inhibition of biases while aiming to reduce the ambiguity of what constitutes implicit bias. We also address how norms modulate how biases unfold and are perceived by targets. Using this typology as a framework, we identify theoretically distinct entry points for antibias interventions. A key insight is that changing associations, increasing motivation, raising awareness, and changing norms are distinct goals that require different types of interventions targeting individual, interpersonal, and institutional structures. We close with recommendations for antibias training grounded in the science of prejudice and stereotyping.

Do conspiracy theories efficiently signal coalition membership? An experimental test using the "Who Said What?" design

Theoretical work in evolutionary psychology have proposed that conspiracy theories may serve a coalitional function. Specifically, fringe and offensive statements such as conspiracy theories are expected to send a highly credible signal of coalition membership by clearly distinguishing the speaker's group from other groups. A key implication of this theory is that cognitive systems designed for alliance detection should intuitively interpret the endorsement of conspiracy theories as coalitional cues. To our knowledge, no previous studies have empirically investigated this claim. Taking the domain of environmental policy as our case, we examine the hypothesis that beliefs framed in a conspiratorial manner act as more efficient coalitional markers of environmental position than similar but non-conspiratorial beliefs. To test this prediction, quota sampled American participants (total N = 2462) completed two pre-registered Who-Said-What experiments where we measured if participants spontaneously categorize targets based on their environmental position, and if this categorization process is enhanced by the use of a conspiratorial frame. We find firm evidence that participants categorize by environmental position, but no evidence that the use of conspiratorial statements increases categorization strength and thus serves a coalitional function.

Just Diverse Among Themselves: How Does Negative Performance Feedback Affect Boards’ Expertise vs. Ascriptive Diversity?

We investigate how negative performance feedback affects board diversity, which is instrumental in shaping a firm’s strategic change. When a firm underperforms compared with its aspiration, its board is motivated to promptly address the underperformance. The board needs to not only help search for strategic alternatives but also quickly build consensus around its strategic reorientation. These two motivations lead the board to value two dimensions of diversity among its members differently. On the one hand, to understand the problem of underperformance and find a solution, the board is motivated to seek new expertise, avoiding redundancy in the pool of expertise already represented in the boardroom. This results in a higher level of diversity in director expertise. On the other hand, the urgent need to build consensus prompts the board to value trust and solidarity and to avoid potential conflict among directors. Because people perceive others with similar ascriptive backgrounds as trustworthy, changes in the board of an underperforming firm are likely to yield a lower level of diversity in its members’ ascriptive backgrounds. These changes in board are affected by the committee chairs of the board whose power and influence are significant in the boardroom. Analyses of the boards of 733 U.S. listed manufacturing firms show that when a firm underperforms compared with its aspirations, it increases the board expertise diversity, but decreases the board ascriptive diversity. When chairs on the board are gender or racial minorities, the negative association between underperformance and the board ascriptive diversity is weakened.

Social Adversity Reduces Polygenic Score Expressivity for General Cognitive Ability, but Not Height

It has been hypothesized that even 'perfect' polygenic scores (PGSs) composed of only causal variants may not be fully portable between different social groups owing to gene-by-environment interactions modifying the expression of relevant variants. The impacts of such interactions involving two forms of social adversity (low socioeconomic status [SES] and discrimination) are examined in relation to the expressivity of a PGS for educational attainment composed of putatively causal variants in a large, representatively sampled and genotyped cohort of US children. A relatively small-magnitude Scarr-Rowe effect is present (SES × PGSEDU predicting General Cognitive Ability [GCA]; sR = .02, 95% CI [.00, .04]), as is a distinct discrimination × PGSEDU interaction predicting GCA (sR = -.02, 95% CI [-.05, 00]). Both are independent of the confounding main effects of 10 ancestral principal components, PGSEDU, SES, discrimination and interactions among these factors. No sex differences were found. These interactions were examined in relation to phenotypic and genotypic data on height, a prospectively more socially neutral trait. They were absent in both cases. The discrimination × PGSEDU interaction is a co-moderator of the differences posited in modern versions of Spearman's hypothesis (along with shared environmentality), lending support to certain environmental explanations of those differences. Behavior-genetic analysis of self-reported discrimination indicates that it is nonsignificantly heritable (h2 = .027, 95% CI [-.05, .10]), meaning that it is not merely proxying some underlying source of heritable phenotypic variability. This suggests that experiences of discrimination might stem instead from the action of purely social forces.

Racism in Europe: Characteristics and Intersections With Other Social Categories

Concerning race and its intertwinements with gender, sexual orientation, class, accents, or ability there is a scarcity of social psychological research in Europe. With an intersectional approach studying racism in Europe it is possible to detect specific experiences of discrimination. The prevalent understanding of European racism is connected to migration from the former colonies to the European metropoles and the post-Second-World-War immigration of ‘guest workers.’ Thus, the focus of this research is on work-related discrimination. Against the background of a short historical review, we present the results of the few existing studies on intersectional discrimination within the labor market in Europe and discuss their implications. The pattern of findings is more complex than the assumption that individuals belonging to two or more marginalized social categories are always the most discriminated ones. Gender, sexual orientation, and origin rather interact with the specific job context. These interactions determine whether minority individuals are discriminated against or even preferred over individuals belonging to the majority group. We argue that considering the stereotype content model and social-identity theory helps to structure the sometimes contradictory results of intersectionality research. Therefore, the review presents new perspectives on racism in Europe based on current research, develops hypotheses on the interplay of intersecting identities, and identifies four novel research questions based on racist attributions considering situational variables: These are the role of concrete job contexts in explaining (no) discrimination, the influence of different stereotypes regarding marginalized groups, the explanatory value of sexual orientation as well as class or socioeconomic-status and age in terms of some patterns of results.

Predicting Dishonesty When the Stakes Are High: Physiologic Responses During Face-to-Face Interactions Identifies Who Reneges on Promises to Cooperate

Trust is risky. The mere perception of strategically deceptive behavior that disguises intent or conveys unreliable information can inhibit cooperation. As gregariously social creatures, human beings would have evolved physiologic mechanisms to identify likely defectors in cooperative tasks, though these mechanisms may not cross into conscious awareness. We examined trust and trustworthiness in an ecological valid manner by (i) studying working-age adults, (ii) who make decisions with meaningful stakes, and (iii) permitting participants to discuss their intentions face-to-face prior to making private decisions. In order to identify why people fulfill or renege on their commitments, we measured neurophysiologic responses in blood and with electrodermal activity while participants interacted. Participants (mean age 32) made decisions in a trust game in which they could earn up to $530. Nearly all interactions produced promises to cooperate, although first decision-makers in the trust game reneged on 30.7% of their promises while second decision-makers reneged on 28%. First decision-makers who reneged on a promise had elevated physiologic stress using two measures (the change in adrenocorticotropin hormone and the change in skin conductance levels) during pre-decision communication compared to those who fulfilled their promises and had increased negative affect after their decisions. Neurophysiologic reactivity predicted who would cooperate or defect with 86% accuracy. While self-serving behavior is not rare, those who exhibit it are stressed and unhappy.

EXPRESS: Representing Social Categories Based on Shared Cultural Knowledge in Adults

The study investigated whether adults rely on cues of shared cultural knowledge when forming social category representations. We used a modified version of the memory confusion paradigm, where participants are presented with photographs of people differing along social category distinctions while listening to utterances associated with the pictures. In the test phase, the task is to match the utterances to the photographs. When category representations are formed, more within-category than between-category errors are expected. Experiment 1 contrasted two cues in social category representations: race and shared cultural knowledge. In Experiment 2, categorisation based on shared cultural knowledge was tested without any competing cue. Experiment 3 replicated previous results about automatic race encoding when no competing social distinction was available. Experiment 4 contrasted gender with cultural category membership. The results indicate that people encode information about race, gender and cultural background; however, the latter two are more fundamental dimensions of social categorisation.

Systemic racism: individuals and interactions, institutions and society

Systemic racism is a scientifically tractable phenomenon, urgent for cognitive scientists to address. This tutorial reviews the built-in systems that undermine life opportunities and outcomes by racial category, with a focus on challenges to Black Americans. From American colonial history, explicit practices and policies reinforced disadvantage across all domains of life, beginning with slavery, and continuing with vastly subordinated status. Racially segregated housing creates racial isolation, with disproportionate costs to Black Americans’ opportunities, networks, education, wealth, health, and legal treatment. These institutional and societal systems build-in individual bias and racialized interactions, resulting in systemic racism. Unconscious inferences, empirically established from perceptions onward, demonstrate non-Black Americans’ inbuilt associations: pairing Black Americans with negative valences, criminal stereotypes, and low status, including animal rather than human. Implicit racial biases (improving only slightly over time) imbed within non-Black individuals’ systems of racialized beliefs, judgments, and affect that predict racialized behavior. Interracial interactions likewise convey disrespect and distrust. These systematic individual and interpersonal patterns continue partly due to non-Black people’s inexperience with Black Americans and reliance on societal caricatures. Despite systemic challenges, Black Americans are more diverse now than ever, due to resilience (many succeeding against the odds), immigration (producing varied backgrounds), and intermarriage (increasing the multiracial proportion of the population). Intergroup contact can foreground Black diversity, resisting systemic racism, but White advantages persist in all economic, political, and social domains. Cognitive science has an opportunity: to include in its study of the mind the distortions of reality about individual humans and their social groups.

What Bias Management Can Learn From Change Management? Utilizing Change Framework to Review and Explore Bias Strategies

This paper conducted a preliminary study of reviewing and exploring bias strategies using a framework of a different discipline: change management. The hypothesis here is: If the major problem of implicit bias strategies is that they do not translate into actual changes in behaviors, then it could be helpful to learn from studies that have contributed to successful change interventions such as reward management, social neuroscience, health behavioral change, and cognitive behavioral therapy. The result of this integrated approach is: (1) current bias strategies can be improved and new ones can be developed with insight from adjunct study fields in change management; (2) it could be more sustainable to invest in a holistic and proactive bias strategy approach that targets the social environment, eliminating the very condition under which biases arise; and (3) while implicit biases are automatic, future studies should invest more on strategies that empower people as "change agents" who can act proactively to regulate the very environment that gives rise to their biased thoughts and behaviors.

Person Perception, Meet People Perception: Exploring the Social Vision of Groups

Groups, teams, and collectives-people-are incredibly important to human behavior. People live in families, work in teams, and celebrate and mourn together in groups. Despite the huge variety of human group activity and its fundamental importance to human life, social-psychological research on person perception has overwhelmingly focused on its namesake, the person, rather than expanding to consider people perception. By looking to two unexpected partners, the vision sciences and organization behavior, we find emerging work that presents a path forward, building a foundation for understanding how people perceive other people. And yet this nascent field is missing critical insights that scholars of social vision might offer: specifically, for example, the chance to connect perception to behavior through the mediators of cognition and motivational processes. Here, we review emerging work across the vision and social sciences to extract core principles of people perception: efficiency, capacity, and complexity. We then consider complexity in more detail, focusing on how people perception modifies person-perception processes and enables the perception of group emergent properties as well as group dynamics. Finally, we use these principles to discuss findings and outline areas fruitful for future work. We hope that fellow scholars take up this people-perception call.

The encoding of race during face processing, an event-related potential study

It is well known that adults spontaneously classify people into social categories and this categorization in turn guides their cognition and behavior. A wealth of research has examined how people perceive race and investigated the effect of race on social behavior. But what about race encoding? Although considerable behavioral research has investigated the encoding of race, that is, the social categorization by race, the neural underpinning of it is largely underexplored. To investigate the time course of race encoding, the current study employed a modified category verification task and a multivariate analyzing approach. We found that racial information became decodable from event-related potential topographies as early as about 200 ms after stimulus onset. At this stage, the brain can differentiate different races in a task-relevant manner. Nonetheless, it is not until 100 ms later that racial information is encoded in a socially relevant manner (own- versus other-race). Importantly, perceptual differentiation not only occurs before the encoding of the race but actually influences it: the faces that are more easily perceptually categorized are actually encoded more readily. Together, we posit that the detection and the encoding of race are decoupled although they are not completely independent. Our results provide powerful constraints toward the theory-building of race.

Racial attention deficit

Despite efforts toward equity in organizations and institutions, minority members report that they are often ignored, their contributions undervalued. Against this backdrop, we conduct a large-sample, multiyear experimental study to investigate patterns of attention. The findings provide causal evidence of a racial attention deficit: Even when in their best interest, White Americans pay less attention to Black peers. In a baseline study, we assign an incentivized puzzle to participants and examine their willingness to follow the example of their White and Black peers. White participants presume that Black peers are less competent—and fail to learn from their choices. We then test two interventions: Providing information about past accomplishments reduces the disparity in evaluations of Black peers, but the racial attention deficit persists. When Whites can witness the accomplishments of Black peers, rather than being told about them, the racial attention deficit subsides. We suggest that such a deficit can explain racial gaps documented in science, education, health, and law.

The Efficiency of Demography in Face Perception

When we look at a face, we cannot help but "read" it: Beyond simply processing its identity, we also form robust impressions of both transient psychological states (e.g., surprise) and stable character traits (e.g., trustworthiness). But perhaps the most fundamental traits we extract from faces are their social demographics, for example, race, age, and gender. How much exposure is required to extract such properties? Curiously, despite extensive work on the temporal efficiency of extracting both higher-level social properties (such as competence and dominance) and more basic characteristics (such as identity and familiarity), this question remains largely unexplored for demography. We correlated observers' percepts of the race/age/gender of unfamiliar faces viewed at several brief durations (and then masked) with their judgments after unlimited exposure. Performance reached asymptote by 100 ms, was above chance by only 33.33 ms, and had a similar temporal profile to detecting faces in the first place. This was true even when the property to be reported wasn't revealed until after the face had disappeared, and when the faces were matched for several lower-level visual properties. Collectively, these results demonstrate that the extraction of demographic features from faces is highly efficient, and can truly be done at a glance.

National parochialism is ubiquitous across 42 nations around the world

Cooperation within and across borders is of paramount importance for the provision of public goods. Parochialism - the tendency to cooperate more with ingroup than outgroup members - limits contributions to global public goods. National parochialism (i.e., greater cooperation among members of the same nation) could vary across nations and has been hypothesized to be associated with rule of law, exposure to world religions, relational mobility and pathogen stress. We conduct an experiment in participants from 42 nations (N = 18,411), and observe cooperation in a prisoner's dilemma with ingroup, outgroup, and unidentified partners. We observe that national parochialism is a ubiquitous phenomenon: it is present to a similar degree across the nations studied here, is independent of cultural distance, and occurs both when decisions are private or public. These findings inform existing theories of parochialism and suggest it may be an obstacle to the provision of global public goods.

Processing of facial expressions of same-race and other-race faces: distinct and shared neural underpinnings

People understand others’ emotions quickly from their facial expressions. However, facial expressions of ingroup and outgroup members may signal different social information and thus be mediated by distinct neural activities. We investigated whether there are distinct neuronal responses to fearful and happy expressions of same-race (SR) and other-race (OR) faces. We recorded electroencephalogram from Chinese adults when viewing an adaptor face (with fearful/neutral expressions in Experiment 1 but happy/neutral expressions in Experiment 2) and a target face (with fearful expressions in Experiment 1 but happy expressions in Experiment 2) presented in rapid succession. We found that both fearful and happy (vs neutral) adaptor faces increased the amplitude of a frontocentral positivity (P2). However, a fearful but not happy (vs neutral) adaptor face decreased the P2 amplitudes to target faces, and this repetition suppression (RS) effect occurred when adaptor and target faces were of the same race but not when of different races. RS was observed on two late parietal/central positive activities to fearful/happy target faces, which, however, occurred regardless of whether adaptor and target faces were of the same or different races. Our findings suggest that early affective processing of fearful expressions may engage distinct neural activities for SR and OR faces.

Racial preferences in sexual attraction among White heterosexual and gay men: Evidence from sexual arousal patterns and negative racial attitudes

Racial preferences in sexual attraction are highly visible and controversial. They may also negatively impact those who are excluded. It is unclear whether these preferences are merely self-attributed or extend to patterns of experienced sexual arousal. Furthermore, some argue that racial preferences in sexual attraction reflect idiosyncratic personal preferences, while others argue that they are more systematically motivated and reflect broader negative attitudes toward particular races. In two studies, we examined these issues by measuring the sexual arousal patterns and negative racial attitudes of 78 White men in relation to their racial preferences in sexual attraction to White versus Black people. For both White heterosexual men (n = 40; Study 1) and White gay men (n = 38; Study 2), greater racial preferences in sexual attraction to White versus Black people of their preferred gender were associated with more subjective and genital arousal by erotic stimuli featuring White versus Black people of their preferred gender, and with more explicit and implicit negative attitudes toward Black people. Findings suggest that racial preferences in sexual attraction are reflected in patterns of sexual arousal, and they might also be systematically motivated by negative attitudes toward particular races.

Intuitive sociology

How do humans intuitively understand the structure of their society? How should psychologists study people's commonsense understanding of societal structure? The present chapter seeks to address both of these questions by describing the domain of "intuitive sociology." Drawing primarily from empirical research focused on how young children represent and reason about social groups, we propose that intuitive sociology consists of three core phenomena: social types (the identification of relevant groups and their attributes); social value (the worth of different groups); and social norms (shared expectations for how groups ought to be). After articulating each component of intuitive sociology, we end the chapter by considering both the emergence of intuitive sociology in infancy as well as transitions from intuitive to reflective representations of sociology later in life.

Identifying Racial Minorities' Nationality: Non-verbal Accent as a Cue to Cultural Group Membership

Historically, racial appearance has been a common source of information upon which we categorize others, as have verbal accents. Enculturated non-verbal accents which are detected in facial expressions of emotion, hairstyle, and everyday behaviors, have also been found to exist. We investigated the effects of non-verbal accent on categorization and stereotyping when people are exposed to thin slices of behavior. The effects of racial essentialism, which inclines people to categorize and assess others by race, were also tested. In three studies, Australian participants were shown short, muted videos of target individuals performing everyday behaviors. The targets were of a minority (Asian) racial appearance, but half had been interracially adopted as babies and grew up in the Australian mainstream. The other half were foreign nationals who grew up in Asia. In Studies 1 and 2, Australian participants rated each target as Australian or foreign. In both studies, they correctly identified the targets at above chance levels. In Study 3, participants rated the targets on Australian and Asian stereotype traits. They were not told that some targets were Australian and some were foreign, but they nonetheless rated the congruent stereotypes more strongly. Lay theory of race moderated the effect of non-verbal accent, with a weaker effect among participants who endorsed racial essentialism. These preliminary findings reveal subtle effects of non-verbal accent as a cue to cultural group membership and invite further work into the effects of non-verbal accent on person perception and categorization processes.

Moral foundations theory, political identity, and the depiction of morality in children's movies

Children's movies often provide messages about morally appropriate and inappropriate conduct. In two studies, we draw on Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) to derive predictions about actual depictions of morality, and people's preferences for different moral depictions, within children's movies. According to MFT, people's moral concerns include individualizing foundations of care and fairness and binding foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Prior work reveals that although there are political differences in the endorsement of these two broad categories-whereby stronger political conservatism predicts stronger binding concerns and weaker individualizing concerns-there nonetheless is broad agreement across political identity in the importance of individualizing concerns. We therefore predicted that heroes would value individualizing foundations more than villains, and that despite political differences in preferences for moral messages, there would be more agreement in the importance of messages promoting individualizing concerns. In Study 1, we coded heroes and villains from popular children's movies for their valuation of moral foundations. Heroes valued individualizing concerns more, and binding concerns less, than villains did. Participants in Study 2 considered moral dilemmas faced by children's movie characters, and rated their preferences for resolutions that promoted either individualizing or binding foundations. Although liberals preferred individualizing-promoting resolutions and conservatives preferred binding-promoting resolutions, there was stronger agreement across political identity in the importance of individualizing concerns. Despite political differences in moral preferences, popular depictions of children's movie characters and people's self-reported moral endorsement suggest a shared belief in the importance of the individualizing moral virtues of care and fairness. Movies are often infused with moral messages. From their exploration of overarching themes, their ascription of particular traits to heroic and villainous characters, and their resolution of pivotal moral dilemmas, movies provide viewers with depictions of morally virtuous (and morally suspect) behavior. Moral messaging in children's movies is of particular importance, since it is targeted at an audience for which morality is actively developing. What moral messages do filmmakers (and consumers, including parents) want children's movies to depict? Are these preferences related to people's political identity? And what are the actual moral depictions presented in movies? In the present two studies, we draw on an influential theory of moral judgment-Moral Foundations Theory-to develop and test predictions about the depiction of morality in children's movies.

Something About the Way You Speak: A Meta-analysis on Children's Linguistic-based Social Preferences

There is growing interest in the role of linguistic cues (accents, dialects, language) in driving children's social preferences. This meta-analysis integrated 131 effect sizes involving 2,680 infants and children from 2 days old to 11 years. Overall, children prefer native-accent, native-dialect, and native-language speakers over non-native counterparts (d = 0.57). Meta-regression highlighted that bilinguals (d = 0.93) do not exhibit less native-speaker preference compared to monolinguals (d = 0.62). Children displayed stronger preferences based on accent (d = 1.04) than dialect (d = 0.44) and language (d = 0.39). Children's cultural background, exposure to non-native speech, age, and preference measure were not significant moderators. The data are discussed in light of several theoretical explanations for when and why children show linguistic-based social preferences.

Social categorization based on permanent versus transient visual traits in neurotypical children and children with autism spectrum disorder

The present study was designed to test the relative weight of different types of category markers in children's representations of social and biological kinds. We reasoned that in order to efficiently navigate through the mesh network of overlapping social categories, the representational system dedicated to processing information about social groups should be prepared to flexibly switch between potential ways of categorizing fellow humans. Thus, we hypothesized that children would assign more relevance to transient but symbolic features, such as shirt colour, when categorizing humans than other animal species. Across two experiments, we investigated whether typically developing children as well as children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder would categorize drawings of humans and dogs along a transient or a biologically set, permanent marker. The results show that both groups of children overwhelmingly selected the permanent feature to categorize dogs, however, they were more likely to categorize fellow humans based on transient features. We suggest that this tendency lays the ground for humans' ability to efficiently represent the complex structure of societies.

The power of allies: Infants' expectations of social obligations during intergroup conflict

Many species of animals form social allegiances to enhance survival. Across disciplines, researchers have suggested that allegiances form to facilitate within group cooperation and defend each other against rival groups. Here, we explore humans' reasoning about social allegiances and obligations beginning in infancy, long before they have experience with intergroup conflict. In Experiments 1 and 2, we demonstrate that infants (17-19 months, and 9-13 months, respectively) expect a social ally to intervene and provide aid during an episode of intergroup conflict. Experiment 3 conceptually replicated the results of Experiments 1 and 2. Together, this set of experiments reveals that humans' understanding of social obligation and loyalty may be innate, and supported by infants' naïve sociology.

Considerations of the proximate mechanisms and ultimate functions of disgust will improve our understanding of cleansing effects

To understand the consequences of cleansing, Lee and Schwarz favor a grounded procedures perspective over recently developed disgust theory. We believe that this position stems from three errors: (1) interpreting cleansing effects as broader than they are; (2) not detailing the proximate mechanisms underlying disgust; and (3) not detailing adaptive function versus system byproducts when developing the grounded procedures perspective.

Proper understanding of grounded procedures of separation needs a dual inheritance approach

Grounded procedures of separation are conceptualized as a learned concept. The simultaneous cultural universality of the general idea and immense diversity of its implementations might be better understood through the lens of dual inheritance theories. By drawing on examples from developmental psychology and emotion theorizing, we argue that an innate blueprint might underlie learned implementations of cleansing that vary widely.