Prejudiced interactions: implicit racial bias reduces predictive simulation during joint action with an out-group avatar

Abstract

During social interactions people automatically apply stereotypes in order to rapidly categorize others. Racial differences are among the most powerful cues that drive these categorizations and modulate our emotional and cognitive reactivity to others. We investigated whether implicit racial bias may also shape hand kinematics during the execution of realistic joint actions with virtual in- and out-group partners. Caucasian participants were required to perform synchronous imitative or complementary reach-to-grasp movements with avatars that had different skin color (white and black) but showed identical action kinematics. Results demonstrate that stronger visuo-motor interference (indexed here as hand kinematics differences between complementary and imitative actions) emerged: i) when participants were required to predict the partner's action goal in order to on-line adapt their own movements accordingly; ii) during interactions with the in-group partner, indicating the partner's racial membership modulates interactive behaviors. Importantly, the in-group/out-group effect positively correlated with the implicit racial bias of each participant. Thus visuo-motor interference during joint action, likely reflecting predictive embodied simulation of the partner's movements, is affected by cultural inter-individual differences.

Interactional leader–follower sensorimotor communication strategies during repetitive joint actions

“…Previous studies have shown that interactions impact on a number of higher-level perceptuocognitive representations as they change the way we co-represent the physical space [22], display our attention [54], perceive our partner [37,[72][73][74][75] and build a common representation of the task at hand [51]. Here, we expand this knowledge by showing that repeatedly interacting with a partner shapes the way in which the pair communicate and organize their behaviour by aligning their representation of the knowledge shared between individuals.…”

Why and how to use virtual reality to study human social interaction: The challenges of exploring a new research landscape

“…Perception of these blended mocap stimuli could be tested in an adaptation context (de la Rosa et al ., 2016) or in the context of different facial identities (Ferstl, Bülthoff, & de la Rosa, 2017). Using a similar method, (Sacheli et al ., 2015) applied the same animation clip to virtual characters with different skin colours (white and black) and found that a stronger interference effect on participant's motion from an in‐group VC as compared to the outgroup one. These studies illustrate the value of using mocap and virtual character technology to create experimental stimuli with precise control.…”

“…With virtual characters, it is possible to create infinitely many combinations of social variables and test them against each other. This has proved valuable in the study of social perception (Todorov, Said, Engell, & Oosterhof, 2008) and social interaction (Hale & Hamilton, 2016; Sacheli et al ., 2015). …”

A kinematic examination of dual-route processing for action imitation

“…Whilst previous work has quantitatively examined the kinematic elements of imitative behavior in both healthy people (e.g., Braadbaart et al, 2012;Campione & Gentilucci, 2011;Era et al, 2018;Forbes & Hamilton, 2017;Gold et al, 2008;Hayes et al, 2016;Krüger et al, 2014;Pan & Hamilton, 2015;Reader & Holmes, 2015;Reader et al, 2018;Sacheli et al, 2012;Sacheli et al, 2013, Sacheli, Christensen, et al, 2015Wild et al, 2010;Williams et al, 2013) and brain-damaged patients (e.g., Candidi et al, 2018;Hermsdörfer et al, 1996), as far as we are aware no previous experiments have looked at so many components of the velocity profile in order to compare the coarse-grained (i.e., wrist) kinematic approach to meaningful and meaningless action imitation. Much informative work has been done to assess action performance in meaningful and meaningless action imitation (e.g., Buxbaum et al, 2014;Goldenberg & Hagmann, 1997;Mengotti et al, 2013), but frequently using only subjective rating measures.…”