The Neural Mechanisms of Prejudice Intervention

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-800935-2.00018-X Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 337 We view the world through a social lens that colors our environment with categorical labels, providing information about, among many things, people’s age, gender, and race. This lens ultimately lays the foundation for how we perceive the world and its organization, including where we live, how we make social connections, the education we receive, our healthcare, the jobs we take on, and how we go about managing our finances. Perhaps most prominently, this lens affects how we see and are seen by others. Although processing social category information may serve as an important and positive function by providing an efficient means to think about those around us, it can also have deleterious effects. Social categorization can result in the application of inaccurate stereotypes and the perpetuation of intergroup conflict.1 The purpose of this chapter is to integrate across the behavioral science and neuroimaging literature on prejudice in an effort to elucidate the mechanisms of prejudice intervention from which scientists can derive innovative theoretical insights for future research. We will focus our overview and analysis primarily on racial prejudice directed toward Blacks in the United States, not because other types of prejudice do not exist, but primarily due to the unfortunate lack of available data involving other types of prejudice and groups (see the Discussion section for suggestions regarding potentially fruitful avenues for future research relating to this concern). We will highlight the effectiveness of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in illuminating the underlying neural substrates of prejudice. The work we review implicates a network of brain regions related to prejudice, namely those involved in person perception and emotion processing—the amygdala, fusiform face area (FFA), and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC)—and regulation—the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). In addition, we present emergent evidence O U T L I N E