DeepBias · Deep Bias: Examining the Cognitive and Physiological Underpinnings of Intergroup Prejudice
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-09-01 → 2022-08-31
- EU contribution
- €187,572
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
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Results in brief
Deep Bias: Examining the Cognitive and Physiological Underpinnings of Intergroup Prejudice
The world is increasingly divided by harshly conflicting viewpoints on issues relating to politics, morality, and equality between racial and religious groups. People on both sides of these divides tend to strongly feel that their social and political attitudes are objectively correct, and that they have arrived at these attitudes via dispassionate, rational deliberation. That is, most people generally tend to feel that their views are simply the result of having carefully considered the issues at hand and then having chosen the side that best aligned with their personal values and interests. However, while it is true that much of our social and political thought can be characterized as rational to some degree, research in the social sciences has increasingly demonstrated that our political and intergroup attitudes are shaped at least in part by low-level, often nonconscious psychological and biological influences. Yet, despite this intriguing fact, we continue to know relatively little about when and how such low-level factors shape people’s attitudes and opinions. In this project, called “DeepBias,” my aim has been to understand (1) which specific biological and cognitive factors can play a role in shaping our political and intergroup attitudes, and (2) how, exactly, these processes unfold. To test these questions, I have used an array of both physiological measurement tools (e.g., skin conductance and heart rate monitors assessing physiological arousal) and cognitive and behavioral measures (e.g., assessing different aspects of sensitivity to threat and disgust). This work has shed important new light on how our political and intergroup attitudes are formed—and show that our views are not as rational and dispassionate as we often like to believe.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Intergroup prejudice gives rise to some of the darkest aspects of human behavior, including discrimination, violence, and inequality. In recent years, the harmful repercussions of intergroup prejudice have become increasingly evident, with the global rise of populist, far-right political movements centered largely on the exclusion of ethnic and religious minority groups. But what factors shape an individual’s degree of prejudice, and why do some people generally tend to develop greater animosity toward social outgroups? The state-of-the-art typically explains individual differences in prejudice via complex attitudinal and motivational factors (e.g., political conservatism, need for closure). However, the deeper cognitive and physiological underpinnings of prejudice remain largely unexplored. This gap in our theoretical understanding also has important practical implications: recent analyses suggest that most prejudice-reduction interventions – based on the current leading theoretical perspectives – have little or no effect, and can at times even increase prejudice. Taken together, these trends reveal that there is a pressing need for research that can provide a deeper understanding of the sources of prejudice, to fill this theoretical gap and help develop effective prejudice-reduction interventions and other means of countering bias. In this Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action, called “DeepBias,” I take a fundamentally different approach to the study of intergroup prejudice, examining how individual differences in implicit (i.e., nonconscious, uncontrollable) sensitivity to threat shape an individual’s prejudice. In this work – building on recent pilot data I have collected in preparation for this MSCA – I utilize cutting-edge cognitive and physiological measures to advadvance our understanding of the sources of individual differences in prejudice beyond abstract beliefs and motivations to identify the lower-level biological and psychological sources of prejudice.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN · LeidenCoordinatorNetherlands
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union