Ethnicity Bias

Psychological biases that concern other people's ethnic group memberships can be among the most striking perceptual, cognitive, and affective habits that characterize the human mind. They typically serve to justify the unequal distribution of resources across (allegedly) different groups of people by affecting human behavior at the individual, institutional and societal level. Despite their psychological complexity, attempts to understand the neural foundation of distinct facets of ethnicity bias have been plenty in recent years. The obtained findings suggest that many facets of this bias recruit prominent networks of the social brain, including the person perception network, the action observation network, and the mentalizing network. Some facets, however, rely on neural structures beyond the social brain by engaging domain-general evaluative and self-regulatory psychological processes. By reviewing both social and non-social neural substrates of ethnicity bias, the current article aims to highlight their distributed, yet complementary contributions. In doing so, this article also reflects on pivotal advances in social neuroscience research and identifies important avenues for future research.