David M. Amodio - US grants

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-50.

Racial discrimination continues to be a national concern in America, despite significant cultural and legislative shifts toward a more egalitarian society. Although overt expressions of bigotry are now relatively infrequent, much psychological research finds that racial biases often lurk in the unconscious mind, from where they may influence behavior in subtle ways without one's intent. As such, a major goal of contemporary prejudice research is to understand how implicit racial biases affect behavior and, importantly, how such biases may be reduced. Dr. David Amodio's research sheds new light on these questions by examining the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie the activation and expression of different forms of implicit racial bias. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Amodio is conducting research that links emotional and conceptual (i.e., stereotyping) forms of implicit bias to different systems of learning and memory in the brain. By linking implicit bias to neural processes, he can apply knowledge from the broader neuroscience literature on how these systems learn and unlearn, and how they interact with mechanisms for cognition, emotion, and behavior, to obtain a novel perspective on the dynamics of racial prejudice. By taking an integrative social cognitive neuroscience approach, Dr. Amodio's research promises to advance our basic understanding of how neural mechanisms of learning and memory function in social behavior while also informing the pressing issue of racial discrimination in American society.

In conjunction with his research goals, Dr. Amodio will develop a new program for education and research in social cognitive neuroscience at New York University. The unique training curriculum incorporates theoretical and methodological approaches from neuroscience, social psychology, and cognitive psychology, directed toward the understanding of social processes and their neural underpinnings. The funding from NSF will support graduate student research and infrastructure for training in neuroimaging. An additional component of this program is the promotion of psychological and neural science in the community. Toward this end, Dr. Amodio's program provides opportunities for high school students and community members to learn more about science through his public presentations and student visits to his laboratory.

When the U.S. economy experiences significant setbacks, its impact is not limited to the financial realm, nor are the detrimental effects evenly shared across all segments of society. For example, in the recent recession, Black Americans had a decrease in household wealth that was much greater than that of Whites. Although widening disparities that occur during recessions are frequently explained in terms of existing structural inequalities, recent findings by Amy R. Krosch, in collaboration with the investigator David M. Amodio, suggests a psychological basis for disparities. Their work indicates that perception of economic scarcity affects visual perception processes such that those from minority racial groups are perceived as more stereotypical in appearance, and in turn, as less deserving of resources. Such findings suggest that economic events can threaten intergroup relations and increase discrimination, putting particular groups at acute risk. However, the psychological mechanisms by which these macroeconomic factors affect racial perceptions is not understood. Understanding such mechanisms is essential for developing ways to reduce the effects of economic scarcity on prejudice and discrimination.

The current project focuses on key sociocognitive mechanisms through which perceptions of economic scarcity cause biased visual perceptions of individuals from racial minority groups. In a series of eight experiments, the investigator tests the hypothesis that perceived scarcity induces not only stereotyping, but dehumanization processes as well: reduced tendency to infer uniquely human-like traits and emotions from a face and to neurally encode it as a human face. Experiments test whether these processes directly bias perceivers' visual representations of individuals from racial minority groups, which, in turn, propagates behavioral discrimination. This research builds on both classic and novel theories of how economic factors influence intergroup relations, and it makes innovative use of behavioral, neuroscientific, and psychophysical methodologies to examine the visual processing of race. This research aims to gain crucial knowledge of how economic factors contribute to persisting disparities and provide some direction for how these effects may be mitigated.