The rapid increase in the racial diversity of our population provides us with growing opportunities to interact with other-race individuals. Whereas investigations of how interracial contact shapes intergroup attitudes and person evaluation have a long scholarly tradition, little is known about how interracial contact influences social cognition beyond intergroup relations. In this line of research, we utilize social cognitive tasks and neuroimaging (fMRI/EEG) to examine how individual differences in intergroup contact across the lifespan influence various social cognitive abilities. We are currently testing potential behavioral and neural consequences of contact diversity in the context of mentalizing ability.

Researchers: Jasmin Cloutier and Jennifer Kubota

Another research question surrounds whether and how implicit and explicit associations interact with visual components of the environment. This area of inquiry also explores how variation in the target individual's features, and in the perceiver's stereotype endorsement, facilitate or hinder social categorization and stereotyping.

Researchers: Jasmin Cloutier and Jennifer Kubota

Using fMRI and EEG, we examine how the availability and use of person-knowledge impacts neural activity when perceiving and evaluating others based on physical cues (i.e., a judgment that requires no person-knowledge) or person-knowledge (e.g., an individual’s past behavior). The goal of these projects is to uncover the processes supporting the use of each kind of information and to identify how individuals weight the various kinds of information when forming impressions and making decisions.

Researchers: Jasmin Cloutier and Jennifer Kubota

We are currently conducting a series of projects examining the perception of police officer-civilian interactions. The growing number of publicly available video recordings of police officer-civilian interactions has elicited divergent public opinions ranging from complete justification of the officer to calls for criminal charges against the officer. Accordingly, this work is timely and aims to identify how the individual differences of perceivers impact evaluations of both the police officer and civilian. This project explores fundamental social cognitive processes (i.e., implicit and explicit associations) and real-world outcomes (e.g., perceptions of aggression and legitimacy) using fMRI, stress reactivity, and eye-tracking.

Researchers: Jasmin Cloutier and Jennifer Kubota

Our lab systematically investigates the perception of status (i.e., hierarchical rank) and its consequences for how we attend to and evaluate others. In our recently published social neuroscience framework for the study of status, we distinguish between (1) status dimensions (i.e., domains in which an individual may be ranked, such as wealth), and (2) status level (i.e., one’s rank along a given dimension). One key takeaway from this distinction is that one's status level may depend on the status dimension in question (e.g., low in financial status, high in moral status). These differences may have important consequences for how we evaluate and interact with those occupying different positions in a given social hierarchy. Additionally, we are interested in how different contexts and status cues may shape status-based evaluations and decisions. Inspired by our social neuroscience framework for the study of status-based evaluations, we are currently exploring how status may interact with salient visible social categories such as race, age, and gender. This work uses a combination of classic social cognitive tasks and neuroimaging (fMRI/EEG).

Researchers: Jasmin Cloutier and Jennifer Kubota