Distinguished Lectures in Humanities: The Nature of Human Race Perception: Psychology and Neuroscience Perspectives

Abstract

People catch others’ racial identities by a glimpse of their faces. Perceived racial identities produce notable impacts on social cognition and emotion and lead to racial biases in social behaviors. Based on behavioral and brain imaging findings, I present a target-observer interaction (TOI) model of race perception, which consists of four cognitive components including the processes of interracial difference, intraracial similarity, intraracial variation, and observers’ own racial identifications. These cognitive processes are associated with dynamic activities in distinct neural circuits covering the occipitotemporal cortices and anterior temporal/prefrontal cortices. These neurocognitive processes provide a basis of racial ingroup biases in social emotions and decision-making. The TOI model has implications for potential interventions of racial biases in social emotions and behaviors.

About the speaker

Shihui HAN is a professor at the School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and a principal investigator at the PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, China. He investigates how sociocultural experiences shape neural mechanisms underlying social cognition and emotion and affect social decision-making and behavior. He proposes a Culture-Behavior-Brain loop model of human development to characterize cultural influences on brain and behavior and an asymmetric race processing model of racial ingroup favoritism in social emotion and behavior. He has published over 250 research articles and a book titled The Sociocultural Brain. He is the founding chief editor of the journal Culture and Brain and an associate editor of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience and Neuroscience Bulletin.