Belief in biological origin of race (racial essentialism) increases sensitivities to cultural category changes measured by ERP mismatch negativity (MMN)

Abstract

The dynamic multicultural view explains culture-specific effects on cognition that cultural knowledge is organized in multiple knowledge systems which are specific to each culture and differentially activated when exposed to related objects or scenes. This view predicts automatic categorizations of environmental information according to the culture-specific knowledge systems. This study investigated whether cultural information could be spontaneously categorized, and the modulation of this process by the belief in the biological origin of race (i.e., racial essentialism) with an event-related brain potential, the visual Mismatch Negativity (vMMN). Deviant pictures of Eastern (Western) culture were randomly presented in a stream of standard Western (Eastern) pictures while participants were playing a video game. Participants who endorse racial essentialism (high group) showed vMMNs to the deviants with high relevance to the Eastern or Western culture and the deviant with low Eastern relevance; while participants with low racial essentialism showed vMMN to the deviant with high Eastern relevance only. These results revealed spontaneous cultural categorization with vMMN and the top-down modulation of spontaneous categorization by personal belief. In addition, this is the first demonstration of MMNs to cultural deviance and the potentials in applying MMNs to study psychological essentialism and social categorization.

Figure 1

Stimulus properties and experimental design: (A) an illustration of the cultural picture (stimulus of the passive oddball paradigm) and the active video game task presented on the computer screen; (B) the organization of the 54 pairs of cultural pictures in the Eastern and Western deviant blocks (“E” indicates the Eastern pictures; “W” indicates the Western pictures; the number indicates a pair of pictures with the same theme); (C) schematic illustrations of the stimuli presented in the Eastern and Western deviant blocks; (D) examples of the Eastern and Western pictures with high or low cultural relevance.

Figure 2

ERP waveforms to the standard and deviant cultural pictures and the deviant-minus-standard difference waveforms at the Cz electrode time-locked to the onset of stimuli. The scalp maps show a central distribution at the 40 ms time period of the peak vMMN responses. For individuals with high racial essentialism, vMMNs were elicited by both the Eastern and Western deviants with high cultural relevance, but only by the Eastern deviants with low cultural relevance. For individuals with low racial essentialism, vMMN was only elicited by the Eastern deviants with high cultural relevance. Positive ERP responses are plotted downward and represented by hot colors in the scalp maps. * indicates significant peak vMMN response (p < 0.05) in the 150 ms to 400 ms analysis time window.

Figure 3

Amplitudes of the vMMN responses to deviants with high or low relevance to the Eastern and Western culture of the high or low racial essentialism individuals. Error bars indicate standard errors of the means. *p < 0.05; n.s., not statistically significant.

Figure 4

Evaluation results of the Eastern and Western picture stimuli. The Eastern picture stimuli showed higher relevance to the Eastern culture than that of the Western culture, while the Western picture stimuli showed higher relevance to the Western culture than that of the Eastern culture. The Eastern and Western pictures were not different in their complexity and familiarity ratings. *p < 0.05; n.s., not statistically significant.