The neural underpinnings of intergroup social cognition: an fMRI meta-analysis

Abstract

Roughly 20 years of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have investigated the neural correlates underlying engagement in social cognition (e.g. empathy and emotion perception) about targets spanning various social categories (e.g. race and gender). Yet, findings from individual studies remain mixed. In the present quantitative functional neuroimaging meta-analysis, we summarized across 50 fMRI studies of social cognition to identify consistent differences in neural activation as a function of whether the target of social cognition was an in-group or out-group member. We investigated if such differences varied according to a specific social category (i.e. race) and specific social cognitive processes (i.e. empathy and emotion perception). We found that social cognition about in-group members was more reliably related to activity in brain regions associated with mentalizing (e.g. dorsomedial prefrontal cortex), whereas social cognition about out-group members was more reliably related to activity in regions associated with exogenous attention and salience (e.g. anterior insula). These findings replicated for studies specifically focused on the social category of race, and we further found intergroup differences in neural activation during empathy and emotion perception tasks. These results help shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition across group lines.

Keywords: fMRI; intergroup bias; meta-analysis; race; social cognition.

Fig. 1.

PRISMA diagram summarizing the literature search and study screening, eligibility and inclusion process.

Fig. 2.

Regions of significant, consistent functional activation for overall in-group vs out-group social cognitive processing.

Fig. 3.

Regions of significant, consistent functional activation for meta-analytic contrasts of in-group vs out-group social cognitive processing.

Fig. 4.

Regions of significant, consistent functional activation for overall racial in-group vs racial out-group social cognitive processing. These regions also reflect the meta-analytic contrasts of racial in-group vs racial out-group social cognitive processing: [(racial out-group > in-group) > (racial in-group > out-group)].

Fig. 5.

Regions of significant, consistent functional activation for racial in-group vs racial out-group empathy and emotion perception.