Project Details
Description
Humans routinely understand other people by observing their faces, a social faculty that is key to successful communication and cooperation. Interacting and understanding another person entails focusing on the individual characteristics of our interaction partners. However, once people categorize individuals as members of social groups different than their own, they tend to treat these individuals homogeneously, thus deindividuating and consequently derogating them. To date, efforts to understand the mechanisms underlying this global tendency have focused on social groups differing in how they look, potentially mischaracterizing some of the mechanisms at the core of the effect. Here we draw on diverse sociocultural contexts in which distinct real-world groups share facial appearance to propose a novel approach to understand the conceptual mechanisms driving deindividuation. We will explore behavioral and neural sensitivity to individuation of people from similarly-looking social groups, discernable only by associated group-related information (e.g., Israeli, Palestinian, or Hispanic names). We predict that name cues of different social groups will impact the behavioral and neural individuation of otherwise identical faces. We will further examine the malleability of this effect to contexts of group relevance, outgroup threat, and conflicting affiliations. Together, these studies will allow us to highlight the processes governing social interactions with individuals from different social groups. Beyond advancing our knowledge, establishing the contribution of conceptual information to deindividuating individuals from different social groups will have large-scale implications on society by assisting in the development of novel approaches to mitigate the biases associated with misidentifying and dehumanizing outgroup members.
Status | Active |
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Effective start/end date | 1/01/22 → … |
Links | https://www.bsf.org.il/search-grant/ |
Funding
- United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF)