Modeling and Comparing Brain Processes in Message and Earned Source Credibility Evaluation

Understanding how humans evaluate credibility is an important scientific question in the era of fake news. Source credibility is among the most important aspects of credibility evaluations. One of the most direct ways to understand source credibility is to use measurements of brain activity of humans who make credibility evaluations. This article reports the results of an experiment during which we have measured brain activity during credibility evaluation using EEG. In the experiment, participants had to learn source credibility of fictitious students based on a preparatory stage, during which they evaluated message credibility with perfect knowledge. The experiment allowed for identification of brain areas that were active when a participant made positive or negative source credibility evaluations. Based on experimental data, we modeled and predicted human source credibility evaluations using EEG brain activity measurements with F1 score exceeding 0.7 (using 10-fold cross-validation). We are also able to model and predict message credibility evaluations with perfect knowledge, and to compare both models obtained from a single experiment.

Impact of interracial contact on inferring mental states from facial expressions

Although decades of research have shown that intergroup contact critically impacts person perception and evaluation, little is known about how contact shapes the ability to infer others' mental states from facial cues (commonly referred to as mentalizing). In a pair of studies, we demonstrated that interracial contact and motivation to attend to faces jointly influence White perceivers' ability to infer mental states based on facial expressions displaying secondary emotions from both White targets alone (study 1) and White and Black targets (study 2; pre-registered). Consistent with previous work on the effect of motivation and interracial contact on other-race face memory, we found that motivation and interracial contact interacted to shape perceivers' accuracy at inferring mental states from secondary emotions. When motivated to attend to the task, high-contact White perceivers were more accurate at inferring both Black and White targets' mental states; unexpectedly, the opposite was true for low-contact perceivers. Importantly, the target race did not interact with interracial contact, suggesting that contact is associated with general changes in mentalizing irrespective of target race. These findings expand the theoretical understanding and implications of contact for fundamental social cognition.

Regional and network neural activity reflect men's preference for greater socioeconomic status during impression formation

Evidence from social psychology suggests that men compared to women more readily display and pursue control over human resources or capital. However, studying how status and gender shape deliberate impression formation is difficult due to social desirability concerns. Using univariate and multivariate fMRI analyses (n = 65), we examined how gender and socioeconomic status (SES) may influence brain responses during deliberate but private impression formation. Men more than women showed greater activity in the VMPFC and NAcc when forming impressions of high-SES (vs. low-SES) targets. Seed partial least squares (PLS) analysis showed that this SES-based increase in VMPFC activity was associated with greater co-activation across an evaluative network for the high-SES versus low-SES univariate comparison. A data-driven task PLS analysis also showed greater co-activation in an extended network consisting of regions involved in salience detection, attention, and task engagement as a function of increasing target SES. This co-activating network was most pronounced for men. These findings provide evidence that high-SES targets elicit neural responses indicative of positivity, reward, and salience during impression formation among men. Contributions to a network neuroscience understanding of status perception and implications for gender- and status-based impression formation are discussed.

Culture Impacts the Neural Response to Perceiving Outgroups Among Black and White Faces

Outgroup members (e.g., individuals whose racial identity differs from perceivers') are stigmatized in Eastern and Western cultures. However, it remains an open question how specific cultural influences affect stigmatization. In this study, we assessed whether cultural learning (i.e., social information acquired from the people in one's environment) associated with Chinese individuals' relocation to the United States differentiated the response to multiple outgroups. Two types of cultural learning predict diverging responses to outgroups - awareness of stereotypes about different racial outgroups is associated with increased negative affect and cognitive control toward the stereotyped outgroup. Conversely, intergroup contact attenuates those responses, and does so to a greater extent for individuals from Western cultures. As Chinese-Americans would have had more opportunities to have contact with both White and Black individuals (relative to the Chinese participants), we explored their responses to outgroups as well. Because the neural regions associated with stereotyping and intergroup contact have been well-characterized, we used neuroimaging to disentangle these possibilities. Eighteen White American, 18 Chinese-American, and 17 Chinese participants - who had relocated to the United States less than 1 year prior - viewed images of Black and White individuals while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants also completed measures of awareness of cultural stereotypes in the United States about Black and White individuals, implicit bias, and experiences with White and Black individuals. Behaviorally, White American and Chinese-American participants had more intergroup contact with either race than did Chinese participants, but there was no effect of participant group on stereotype knowledge or implicit bias. When viewing faces of White (as compared to Black) individuals while undergoing fMRI, White American (relative to Chinese) participants had attenuated activation in regions of the brain associated with cognitive control, including the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, dorsal striatum, and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Chinese-Americans' neural response to either race did not differ from White American or Chinese participants. Taken together, outgroup biases seemed to emerge in a culturally-dependent way based on variability in intergroup contact, but not necessarily awareness of stereotypes.

Motivation Modulates Brain Networks in Response to Faces Varying in Race and Status: A Multivariate Approach

Previous behavioral and neuroimaging work indicates that individuals who are externally motivated to respond without racial prejudice tend not to spontaneously regulate their prejudice and prefer to focus on nonracial attributes when evaluating others. This fMRI multivariate analysis used partial least squares analysis to examine the distributed neural processing of race and a relevant but ostensibly nonracial attribute (i.e., socioeconomic status) as a function of the perceiver's external motivation. Sixty-one white male participants (Homo sapiens) privately formed impressions of black and white male faces ascribed with high or low status. Across all conditions, greater external motivation was associated with reduced coactivation of brain regions believed to support emotion regulation (rostral anterior cingulate cortex), introspection (middle cingulate), and social cognition (temporal pole, medial prefrontal cortex). The reduced involvement of this network irrespective of target race and status suggests that external motivation is related to the participant's overall approach to impression formation in an interracial context. The findings highlight the importance of examining network coactivation in understanding the role of external motivation in impression formation, among other interracial social processes.

How Social Status Shapes Person Perception and Evaluation: A Social Neuroscience Perspective

Inferring the relative rank (i.e., status) of others is essential to navigating social hierarchies. A survey of the expanding social psychological and neuroscience literatures on status reveals a diversity of focuses (e.g., perceiver vs. agent), operationalizations (e.g., status as dominance vs. wealth), and methodologies (e.g., behavioral, neuroscientific). Accommodating this burgeoning literature on status in person perception, the present review offers a novel social neuroscientific framework that integrates existing work with theoretical clarity. This framework distinguishes between five key concepts: (1) strategic pathways to status acquisition for agents, (2) status antecedents (i.e., perceptual and knowledge-based cues that confer status rank), (3) status dimensions (i.e., domains in which an individual may be ranked, such as wealth), (4) status level (i.e., one's rank along a given dimension), and (5) the relative importance of a given status dimension, dependent on perceiver and context characteristics. Against the backdrop of this framework, we review multiple dimensions of status in the nonhuman and human primate literatures. We then review the behavioral and neuroscientific literatures on the consequences of perceived status for attention and evaluation. Finally, after proposing a social neuroscience framework, we highlight innovative directions for future social status research in social psychology and neuroscience.

Intergroup contact throughout the lifespan modulates implicit racial biases across perceivers' racial group

Few researchers have investigated how contact across the lifespan influences racial bias and whether diversity of contact is beneficial regardless of the race of the perceiver. This research aims to address these gaps in the literature with a focus on how diversity in childhood and current contact shapes implicit racial bias across perceivers’ racial group. In two investigations, participants completed an Implicit Association Test and a self-report measure of the racial diversity of their current and childhood contact. In both studies, increased contact with Black compared with White individuals, both in childhood (Study 2) and currently (Studies 1 and 2), was associated with reduced implicit pro-White racial bias. For Black individuals (Study 2) more contact with Black compared with White individuals also was associated with reduced implicit pro-White racial bias. These findings suggest that diversity in contact across the lifespan may be related to reductions in implicit racial biases and that this relationship may generalize across racial groups.