Attitudes towards the outgroup are predicted by activity in the precuneus in Arabs and Israelis

The modern socio-political climate is defined by conflict between ethnic, religious and political groups: Bosnians and Serbs, Tamils and Singhalese, Irish Catholics and Protestants, Israelis and Arabs. One impediment to the resolution of these conflicts is the psychological bias that members of each...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:NeuroImage (Orlando, Fla.) Fla.), 2010-10, Vol.52 (4), p.1704-1711
Main Authors: Bruneau, Emile G., Saxe, Rebecca
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
African Americans
Arab Israeli relations
Arab people
Arabs
Attitude - ethnology
Cellular telephones
Cognition & reasoning
Emotions - physiology
Evoked Potentials - physiology
Humans
Israel
Jews
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Medical imaging
Parietal Lobe - physiology
Politics
Prejudice
Studies
Threats
Violence
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Summary:The modern socio-political climate is defined by conflict between ethnic, religious and political groups: Bosnians and Serbs, Tamils and Singhalese, Irish Catholics and Protestants, Israelis and Arabs. One impediment to the resolution of these conflicts is the psychological bias that members of each group harbor towards each other. These biases, and their neural bases, are likely different from the commonly studied biases towards racial outgroups. We presented Arab, Israeli and control individuals with statements about the Middle East from the perspective of the ingroup or the outgroup. Subjects rated how ‘reasonable’ each statement was, during fMRI imaging. Increased activation in the precuneus (PC) while reading pro-outgroup vs. pro-ingroup statements correlated strongly with both explicit and implicit measures of negative attitudes towards the outgroup; other brain regions that were involved in reasoning about emotionally-laden information did not show this pattern.
ISSN:1053-8119
1095-9572
DOI:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.05.057