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Summary. In this chapter, we address the topics of stereotyping and prejudice, staying firmly within the bounds of what science has demonstrated. However, in keeping with the mission of this book, we spell out what we see to be some obvious, and also some less obvious, tentacles to questions of public policy. We posed the following questions to ourselves: What are the broad lessons learned that have changed our understanding of human nature and social relations in recent decades? In what way does the new view run counter to long-held assumptions? How should policy involving intergroup relations proceed in light of these discoveries? And, can we speak about "personal policies" that may emerge from the education of individuals about the constraints and flexibility of their own minds while also considering the notion of policy in the usual "public" sense? Our contention is that personal arid public policy discussions regarding prejudice and discrimination are too often-based on an outdated notion of the nature of prejudice. Most continue to view prejudice as it was formulated generations ago: negative attitudes about social groups and their members rooted in ignorance and perpetuated by individuals motivated-by animus and hatred. The primary implication of the old view was that prejudice is best addressed by changing the hearts and minds of individuals, for good-hearted people will think well of others and behave accordingly. However, research in recent years demonstrates that the old view of prejudice is incomplete, even dangerously so. Staying with it would lead to policy choices that might be ineffectual, or worse. Staying with it would be akin to ignoring the evidence on smoking and cancer. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
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Summary. An individual has a mind; a group does not. Yet humans routinely endow groups with mental states irreducible to any of their members (e.g., “scientists hope to understand every aspect of nature”). But are these mental states categorically similar to those we attribute to individuals? In two fMRI experiments, we tested this question against a set of brain regions that are consistently associated with social cognition—medial pFC, anterior temporal lobe, TPJ, and medial parietal cortex. Participants alternately answered questions about the mental states and physical attributes of individual people and groups. Regions previously associated with mentalizing about individuals were also robustly responsive to judgments of groups, suggesting that perceivers deploy the same social-cognitive processes when thinking about the mind of an individual and the “mind” of a group. However, multivariate searchlight analysis revealed that several of these regions showed distinct multivoxel patterns of response to groups and individual people, suggesting that perceivers maintain distinct representations of groups and individuals during mental state inferences. These findings suggest that perceivers mentalize about groups in a manner qualitatively similar to mentalizing about individual people, but that the brain nevertheless maintains important distinctions between the representations of such entities.
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