Deep Bias: Examining the Cognitive and Physiological Underpinnings of Intergroup Prejudice

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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.