Racial ingroup and outgroup attention biases revealed by event-related brain potentials

Abstract

Recent electrophysiological research indicates that perceivers differentiate others on the basis of race extremely quickly. However, most categorization studies have been limited to White participants, neglecting potential differences in processing between racial groups. Moreover, the extent to which race interferes with categorization along other dimensions when race is made irrelevant to a perceiver's task is not known. A gender categorization task was used to test the extent to which race information would implicitly interfere with explicit gender categorization. As predicted, behavioral and electrocortical data indicated that participants attended to both the task-relevant gender dimension and the task-irrelevant race dimension. Additionally, processing of target race differed between Black and White participants. Ingroup attention biases in the N200 component of the event-related brain potential facilitated target categorization, suggesting a potential functional role for early differentiation of ingroup and outgroup targets.

A Foot in Both Worlds: Asian Americans' Perceptions of Asian, White, and Racially Ambiguous Faces

“…Finding that Asian participants similarly show larger P200s to White targets further supports this interpretation. Moreover, the fi ndings allow us to generalize the conclusion that race is processed quickly (and probably with little effort) beyond just White perceivers (see also, Dickter & Bartholow, 2007).…”

Us versus them: Understanding the process of race perception with event-related brain potentials

“…Numerous studies have replicated these initial ERP effects as a function of target race (e.g., Correll, Urland, & Ito, 2006;Dickter & Bartholow, 2007;Dickter & Gyuvorski, 2012;Ito, Thompson, & Cacioppo, 2004;Ito & Tomelleri, 2013;Ito & Urland, 2005;James, Johnstone, & Hayward, 2001;Kubota & Ito, 2007;Walker, Silvert, Hewstone, & Nobre, 2008;Wiese, 2012;Willadsen-Jensen & Ito, 2006, gender (Ito & Urland, 2005;Mouchetant-Rostaing, Giard, Bentin, Aguera, & Pernier, 2000), and age (Mouchetant-Rostaing & Giard, 2003;Weise & Schweinberger, 2008). Taken together, these findings provide initial evidence that social category information of various forms impacts perceptions of faces rapidly and in a taskindependent fashion.…”

“…One important study demonstrating the generalizability of these effects was done by Dickter and Bartholow (2007), who recorded ERPs from both Black and White participants as they viewed pictures of both Blacks and Whites. P200s and N200s from the White participants replicated the patterns we have repeatedly noted in this review: larger P200s to Blacks but larger N200s to Whites.…”

How pain empathy depends on ingroup/outgroup decisions: A functional magnet resonance imaging study

“…There is not only an ingroup bias concerning altruistic behavior, but also concerning empathy -which is assumed to influence altruism and interpersonal behavior. This has been well examined for real groups (Dickter and Bartholow, 2007;Avenanti et al, 2010;Campbell and de Waal, 2011;Cheon et al, 2011;Bruneau et al, 2012). However, whether empathy is also affected by minimal group membership has rarely been explored (Montalan et al, 2012).…”