Prosocial behavior, helping others in need in particular, occurs preferentially in response to the perceived distress of one's own group members or ingroup. To investigate the development of ingroup bias, neural activity during a helping test was analyzed in adolescent and adult rats. Although adults selectively released trapped ingroup members, adolescent rats helped both ingroup and outgroup members, suggesting that ingroup bias emerges in adulthood. Analysis of brain-wide neural activity, indexed by expression of the early-immediate gene c-Fos, revealed increased activity for ingroup members across a broad set of regions previously associated with empathy. Adolescents showed reduced hippocampal and insular activity and increased orbitofrontal cortex activity compared to adults. Non-helper adolescents demonstrated increased amygdala connectivity. These findings demonstrate that biases for group-dependent prosocial behavior develop with age in rats and suggest that specific brain regions contribute to prosocial selectivity, pointing to possible targets for the functional modulation of ingroup bias.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.104412 | DOI Listing |
J Exp Child Psychol
December 2024
Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
The minimal group effect, in which people prefer ingroup members to outgroup members even when group membership is trivially constructed, has been studied extensively in psychological science. Despite a large body of literature on this phenomenon, concerns persist regarding previous developmental research populations that are small and lack racial/ethnic diversity. In addition, it remains unclear what role holding membership within and interacting with specific racial/ethnic groups plays in the development of children's group attitudes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSoc Neurosci
December 2024
Center for Research in Cognition and Neuroscience, Université libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium.
Neural reactions to others' pain are usually lower when the individual is of a different ethnicity than when they are of the same ethnicity. This suggests that empathy is not only an automatic phenomenon but also a motivated one. In the present study, we tested whether one's willingness to increase or decrease empathy would correspondingly increase or decrease the neural empathic response, as measured with electroencephalography (EEG), irrespective of ethnicity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Comput Sci
December 2024
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.
Social identity biases, particularly the tendency to favor one's own group (ingroup solidarity) and derogate other groups (outgroup hostility), are deeply rooted in human psychology and social behavior. However, it is unknown if such biases are also present in artificial intelligence systems. Here we show that large language models (LLMs) exhibit patterns of social identity bias, similarly to humans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA A Pract
December 2024
From the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California.
Background: Holistic review of applications may optimize recruitment of residents by seeking out characteristics best aligned with program culture. The goals of this mixed methods research were to engage residency recruitment stakeholders to develop a holistic scoring rubric, measure the correlation between the rubric score and the final global rating used to rank applicants for the National Resident Matching Program Match, and qualitatively analyze committee discussions at the end of the interview day about applicants for potential unconscious biases.
Methods: Forty stakeholders (32 faculty, 3 chief residents, and 5 administrative staff) completed an iterative consensus-driven process to identify the most highly valued applicant attributes, and a corresponding standardized question for each attribute.
J Exp Child Psychol
March 2025
Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study, Hitotsubashi University, Kunitachi, Tokyo 186-8601, Japan.
In an ideal world, there would be sufficient resources to be fairly allocated to everyone. The reality, however, is that resources are often limited. How do children navigate resource distribution decisions in the face of scarcity and sufficiency? Our study consisted of two experiments with 4- to 12-year-olds (N = 96), where children were required to distribute resources among themselves, a gender ingroup member, and a gender outgroup member when there was a limited number of resources (Experiment 1) and when there were sufficient resources for an equitable distribution (Experiment 2).
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