The Neural Mechanisms of Opposition to Race-Targeted Government Assistance

• In Event: Experimental Studies of Racial and Ethnic Prejudice

Abstract

How do we diminish the role of racial prejudice in influencing attitudes toward race-targeted government assistance? Some work suggests that with regard to political messages broadly, prejudice is most likely to be cued when racial appeals are implicit rather than explicit because when race is primed explicitly, people utilize higher-level cognitive processes to inhibit prejudiced instincts and abide by egalitarian social norms (Mendelberg 2001; Valentino, Hutchings, and White 2002). If this is the case, race-targeted policy attitudes such as those toward affirmative action should not be driven substantially by racial prejudice because these policies inherently make race explicit. However, we know that prejudice plays a significant role in race-targeted policy attitudes (Federico and Sidanius 2002; Henry and Sears 2002; Kinder and Sears 1981). This study uses function Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to adjudicate between two potential answers to why this is the case, each with substantially different implications for what interventions are most likely to reduce the role of prejudice. According to one hypothesis, the effect of prejudice is due to uninhibited negative reactions to racial outgroups and a lack of controlled processing. According to a competing hypothesis, however, the effect of prejudice stems from controlled processes that reinforce rather than inhibit negative reactions to racial outgroups. Thus, the key to diminishing the role of prejudice when race is a salient component of a policy – i.e. when going “color-blind” is not an option – may not be to simply encourage controlled processing but to restructure the controlled processing that does occur.

A 2 (race: White vs. Black) x 2 (conscious awareness: non-conscious/implicit vs. conscious/explicit) within-subjects design is used to a) directly examine the neural mechanisms assumed to yield a greater role for racial prejudice when racial cues are implicit versus explicit, and b) determine whether racial biases in support for policies involving explicit racial cues (as is the case with race-targeted policies) decrease as a function of controlled processing or remain equal net levels of controlled processing. Specifically, participants’ neural activity in key regions of interest (ROIs) are monitored as they evaluate whether individuals should receive financial assistance from the government. The race of the applicant is varied as well as whether the applicant’s race is shown either consciously or subliminally. Existing work in social neuroscience has made significant headway in developing a framework of the neural pathways underlying how people process racial stimuli. Essentially (although there are various caveats), quick, gut-level, aversive reactions to racial outgroups are associated with activation in parts of the brain related to detecting emotional significance in one’s environment such as the amygdala and right insula. Yet over time these automatic reactions can be inhibited by controlled processing in “higher-level” areas of the brain such as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC). However, controlled processing does not “necessarily” yield inhibition of prejudiced reactions and I test the novel hypothesis that controlled processing in some cases reinforces prejudice. If controlled processing is, as much existing literature assumes, a tool for inhibiting the role of prejudice, then evaluations made while race is consciously primed should be associated with increased activity in the ACC and PFC and lower levels of racial bias. However, if controlled processing sometimes exacerbates prejudice, activity in the ACC and PFC will be associated with lower levels of racial bias for some people but greater levels of racial bias for others.

This study moves forward the literature on race and politics in two critical ways: 1) by developing a theoretical framework for how prejudice affects race-targeted policy attitudes, and 2) by directly observing the mechanisms underlying this relationship. Existing work has little to say about how prejudice affects attitudes toward policies that fundamentally bring race “front and center.” The tacit assumption of much existing work is that the influence of prejudice can be diminished by getting people to “think about it more” - that is, engage in greater controlled processing with regard to race. This study pits this largely untested assumption against a competing hypothesis: that greater controlled processing does not necessarily reduce the role of prejudice but can instead reinforce it. Further, with the use of fMRI, this study therefore has the potential to decisively determine how race influences political attitudes via direct observation of the neural processes that are often assumed or relegated to the “black box” of the brain.

Authors

• Frank John Gonzalez, University of Arizona

• Ingrid Haas, University of Nebraska-Lincoln