Social neuroscience similarly uses the brain and body to understand how we think and act, with a focus on how we think about and act toward other people. More specifically, we can think of social neuroscience as an interdisciplinary field that uses a range of neuroscience measures to understand how other people influence our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. As such, social neuroscience studies the same topics as social psychology, but does so from a multilevel perspective that includes the study of the brain and body. Figure 1 shows the scope of social neuroscience with respect to the older fields of social psychology and neuroscience. Although the field is relatively new – the term first appeared in 1992 (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1992) – it has grown rapidly, thanks to technological advances making measures of the brain and body cheaper and more powerful than ever before, and to the recognition that neural and physiological information are critical to understanding how we interact with other people.
Figure 1. Social neuroscience is the intersection of social psychology and neuroscience. Under this multilevel approach, neural/physiological processes and behavior are two things we can measure or observe. Psychological states cannot be directly observed, but understanding them is the goal. Social neuroscientists use the observable neural/physiological processes and behavioral responses to make inferences about unobservable psychological states. The bidirectional arrows show that all levels of analysis are assumed to influence each other (e.g., psychological states can influence neural responses, and neural responses can influence psychological states).
Social neuroscience can be thought of as both a methodological approach (using measures of the brain and body to study social processes) and a theoretical orientation (seeing the benefits of integrating neuroscience into the study of social psychology). The overall approach in social neuroscience is to understand the psychological processes that underlie our social behavior. Because those psychological processes are intrapsychic phenomena that cannot be directly observed, social neuroscientists rely on a combination of measureable or observable neural and physiological responses as well as actual overt behavior to make inferences about psychological states (see Figure 1). Using this approach, social neuroscientists have been able to pursue three different types of questions: (1) What more can we learn about social behavior when we consider neural and physiological responses? (2) What are the actual biological systems that implement social behavior (e.g., what specific brain areas are associated with specific social tasks)? and (3) How are biological systems impacted by social processes?
In this module, we review three research questions that have been addressed with social neuroscience that illustrate the different goals of the field. These examples also expose you to some of the frequently used measures.
How Automatically Do We Judge Other People?
Social categorization is the act of mentally classifying someone as belonging in a group. Why do we do this? It is an effective mental shortcut. Rather than effortfully thinking about every detail of every person we encounter, social categorization allows us to rely on information we already know about the person’s group. For example, by classifying your restaurant server as a man, you can quickly activate all the information you have stored about men and use it to guide your behavior. But this shortcut comes with potentially high costs. The stored group beliefs might not be very accurate, and even when they do accurately describe some group members, they are unlikely to be true for every member you encounter. In addition, many beliefs we associate with groups – called stereotypes – are negative. This means that relying on social categorization can often lead people to make negative assumptions about others.
The potential costs of social categorization make it important to understand how social categorization occurs. Is it rare or does it occur often? Is it something we can easily stop, or is it hard to override? One difficulty answering these questions is that people are not always consciously aware of what they are doing. In this case, we might not always realize when we are categorizing someone. Another concern is that even when people are aware of their behavior, they can be reluctant to accurately report it to an experimenter. In the case of social categorization, subjects might worry they will look bad if they accurately report classifying someone into a group associated with negative stereotypes. For instance, many racial groups are associated with some negative stereotypes, and subjects may worry that admitting to classifying someone into one of those groups means they believe and use those negative stereotypes.
Figure 2: This man is wearing an elastic electrode cap into which individual electrodes (inside the white circles) are sewn into standardized locations. [Image: Hans, CC0 Public Domain, https://goo.gl/m25gce]
Social neuroscience has been useful for studying how social categorization occurs without having to rely on self-report measures, instead measuring brain activity differences that occur when people encounter members of different social groups. Much of this work has been recorded using the electroencephalogram, or EEG. EEG is a measure of electrical activity generated by the brain’s neurons. Comparing this electrical activity at a given point in time against what a person is thinking and doing at that same time allows us to make inferences about brain activity associated with specific psychological states. One particularly nice feature of EEG is that it provides very precise timing information about when brain activity occurs. EEG is measured non-invasively with small electrodes that rest on the surface of the scalp. This is often done with a stretchy elastic cap, like the one shown in Figure 2, into which the small electrodes are sewn. Researchers simply pull the cap onto the subject’s head to get the electrodes into place; wearing it is similar to wearing a swim cap. The subject can then be asked to think about different topics or engage in different tasks as brain activity is measured.
To study social categorization, subjects have been shown pictures of people who belong to different social groups. Brain activity recorded from many individual trials (e.g., looking at lots of different Black individuals) is then averaged together to get an overall idea of how the brain responds when viewing individuals who belong to a particular social group. These studies suggest that social categorization is an automatic process – something that happens with little conscious awareness or control – especially for dimensions like gender, race, and age (Ito & Urland, 2003; Mouchetant-Rostaing & Giard, 2003). The studies specifically show that brain activity differs when subjects view members of different social groups (e.g., men versus women, Black people versus White peop), suggesting that the group differences are being encoded and processed by the perceiver. One interesting finding is that these brain changes occur both when subjects are purposely asked to categorize the people into social groups (e.g., to judge whether the person is Black or White), and also when they are asked to do something that draws attention away from group classifications (e.g., making a personality judgment about the person) (Ito & Urland, 2005). This tells us that we do not have to intend to make group classifications in order for them to happen. It is also very interesting to consider how quickly the changes in brain responses occur. Brain activity is altered by viewing members of different groups within 200 milliseconds of seeing a person’s face. That is just two-tenths of a second. Such a fast response lends further support to the idea that social categorization occurs automatically and may not depend on conscious intention.
Overall, this research suggests that we engage in social categorization very frequently. In fact, it appears to happen automatically (i.e., without us consciously intending for it to happen) in most situations for dimensions like gender, age, and race. Since classifying someone into a group is the first step to activating a group stereotype, this research provides important information about how easily stereotypes can be activated. And because it is hard for people to accurately report on things that happen so quickly, this issue has been difficult to study using more traditional self-report measures. Using EEGs has, therefore, been helpful in providing interesting new insights into social behavior.
Social Neuroscience by Tiffany A. Ito and Jennifer T. Kubota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available in our Licensing Agreement.
