The Neuroscience of Intergroup Relations

Abstract

We review emerging research on the psychological and biological factors that underlie social group formation, cooperation, and conflict in humans. Our aim is to integrate the intergroup neuroscience literature with classic theories of group processes and intergroup relations in an effort to move beyond merely describing the effects of specific social out-groups on the brain and behavior. Instead, we emphasize the underlying psychological processes that govern intergroup interactions more generally: forming and updating our representations of "us" and "them" via social identification and functional relations between groups. This approach highlights the dynamic nature of social identity and the context dependent nature of intergroup relations. We argue that this theoretical integration can help reconcile seemingly discrepant findings in the literature, provide organizational principles for understanding the core elements of intergroup dynamics, and highlight several exciting directions for future research at the interface of intergroup relations and neuroscience. (146 words)The neuroscience of intergroup relations 3The neuroscience of intergroup relations: An integrative reviewThe human brain is "truly social", which is to say specialized for group living (Caporeal, 1997;Dunbar, 1998). People who accurately identify, value, and cooperate with in-group members enjoy numerous benefits, including the fulfillment of many basic psychological needs (Allport, 1954;Correll & Park, 2005;Kurzban & Neuberg, 2005;Wilson & Wilson, 2007). The value humans place on group membership is illustrated by the ease with which humans form groups and favor in-group members. The propensity to prefer one's in-group has been observed in every culture on earth (Brown, 1991) and in children as young as five (Dunham et al., 2011;Fehr, Bernhard, & Rockenbach, 2008). Extensive research has shown that even arbitrary assignment to a group elicits preferences for in-group relative to out-group members across a wide variety of indices, and does so in the absence of factors typically thought to account for intergroup discrimination, such as prior contact with in-group or out-group members and competition over resources (Tajfel, 1970).The functional benefits of group membership notwithstanding, group life is also a source of social strife and destruction (e.g., pressure to conform within groups, protracted conflict between groups; Brewer, 1999;Cosmides, 1989;Hewstone et al., 2002;Neuberg & Cottrell, 2006). Intergroup conflict, in particular, has been described as "one of the greatest problems facing the world today" (Cohen & Insko, 2008). For example, it has been estimated that over 200 million people were killed in the last century due to genocide, war, and other forms of group conflict (Woolf & Hulsizer, 2004). The social and economic obstacles of group living have attracted the attention of scholars and scientists from social, developmental, evolutionary, and cognitive psychology, social neuroscience, biological and cultural anthropology,...

The role of empathy in intergroup relations

“…Recent research in social neuroscience has investigated other brain areas involved in empathy, and have reported findings clearly establishing neural activity associated with intergroup bias [42,43]. One key study [44], for example, involved Chinese and Caucasian A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t activations in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula cortex (two regions typically activated during the experience of pain) in participants, whereas this response was diminished when viewing faces of the outgroup race.…”

Not on my team: Medial prefrontal cortex responses to ingroup fusion and unfair monetary divisions

“…Whilst the design of this experiment was not optimized to look at how the brain processes the rewards received by others, the ACCg did respond differently to ingroup individuals compared to others. Notably, this is a distinct region of the ACC from that engaged when processing the similarity of others (Cikara & Van Bavel, 2014; Losin, Cross, Iacoboni, & Dapretto, 2014). This suggests that the response of ACCg to rewards that others will receive may depend on their group membership.…”

“…Recent meta‐analyses have highlighted that the DMPFC and the Insula are key regions that respond differentially to equitable and inequitable offers in the UG (Feng et al., 2015; Gabay et al., 2014). Similarly, a large number of different paradigms have shown that several regions including both the DMPFC and VMPFC respond to ingroup and outgroup members differently (Cikara & Van Bavel, 2014; Cikara et al., 2014; Harris & Fiske, 2006; Hein et al., 2010; Molenberghs et al., 2016). The response in these regions has been shown to predict helping of outgroup members and differential punishment of ingroup versus outgroup behaviors.…”

“…This follows decades of research showing that people have favorable in‐group attitudes and unfavorable out‐group attitudes, even when group categorizations are only minimally emphasized (Hewstone et al., 2002). Our study extends these findings by showing that these biases can have a significant effect on the response of the mPFC to others’ behaviors (Aoki et al., 2014; Cikara & Van Bavel, 2014; Izuma, 2013), and moreover, in the VMPFC this response is dependent on the degree to which the individual is fused to the ingroup.…”

“…Lesions to these regions impair and reduce the execution of social behaviors and can lead to the inability to adhere to group or social norms (Anderson, Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1999; Gu et al., 2015; Hadland, Rushworth, Gaffan, & Passingham, 2003; Rudebeck, Buckley, Walton, & Rushworth, 2006; Tranel, Bechara, & Denburg, 2002). Notably, accounts have highlighted that these regions play important roles in processing information about group membership and categorization, and information regarding whether the actions of others violate group norms (Cikara, Jenkins, Dufour, & Saxe, 2014; Cikara & Van Bavel, 2014; Hein, Silani, Preuschoff, Batson, & Singer, 2010; Molenberghs, Gapp, Wang, Louis, & Decety, 2016; Molenberghs & Morrison, 2014). …”