Social Neuroscience
There are many connections to be made from social neuroscience research to conflict, we will look at two major areas for the purposes of this book:
- How Your Brain Processes Conflict
- How Automatically Your Brain Judges People
Psychology has a long tradition of using our brains and body to better understand how we think and act. For example, in 1939 Heinrich Kluver and Paul Bucy removed the temporal lobes in some rhesus monkeys and observed the effect that had on their behavior. Included in these lobes was a subcortical area of the brain called the amygdala. After surgery, the monkeys experienced profound behavioral changes, including loss of fear. These results provided initial evidence that the amygdala plays a role in emotional responses, a finding that has since been confirmed by subsequent studies (Phelps & LeDoux, 2005; Whalen & Phelps, 2009).
What Is Social Neuroscience?
Social neuroscience uses the brain and body to understand how we think and act, with a focus on how we think about and act towards other people. We can think of social neuroscience as an interdisciplinary field that uses a range of neuroscience measures to understand how other people influence our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. As such, social neuroscience studies the same topics as social psychology, but does so from a multilevel perspective that includes the study of the brain and body.
How does your brain process conflict?
When we experience conflict we all have some kind of physical response to the specific stress being triggered. This could range from rosy cheeks and sweaty palms to queasy stomachs and/or clenched teeth. These are the physical symptoms of conflict. But what is going on in our brains?
When you first experience conflict, your limbic system (this system includes our amygdala which plays an important part in regulating emotions, behaviors and is typically talked about as the place where our “Fight or Flight” response lives) scans the environment for threats or rewards. Depending upon the intensity of conflict, you could experience an Amygdala Hijacking where you can no longer access the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates empathy, decision making, problem solving, and much more. Those experiencing an amygdala hijacking may lash out, run away, or freeze up.
The thalamus, your brain’s perception center, starts to work on interpreting the stimuli created by the conflict. This is where our wrong assumptions develop. Our brain creates a story or a narrative of the entire conflict from beginning to end, even if we don’t have all the information necessary for the complete story.
Essentially, our brains are wired to react to conflict, but not to respond productively.
How Automatically Do We Judge Other People?
Social categorization is the act of mentally classifying someone as belonging in a group. Why do we do this? It is an effective mental shortcut. Rather than thinking about every detail of a person we encounter, social categorization allows us to rely on information we already know about the person’s group. For example, by classifying your restaurant server as a man, you can quickly activate all the information you have stored about men and use it to guide your behavior. But this shortcut comes with potentially high costs. The stored group beliefs may not be very accurate, and even when they do accurately describe some group members, they are unlikely to be true for every member you encounter. In addition, many beliefs we associate with groups (stereotypes) are negative. This means that relying on social categorization can often lead people to make negative assumptions about others.
Imagine how social categorization impacts us in conflict situations. If we have previous experiences with someone who reminds us of another person, our brain relies on that past and potentially unrelated information to directly inform our current conflict. The potential costs of social categorization makes it important to understand how social categorization occurs.
- Is social categorization rare or does it occur often?
- Is it something we can easily stop, or is it hard to override?
One difficulty answering these questions is that people are not always consciously aware of what they are doing. In this case, we might not realize when we are categorizing someone. Another concern is that even when people are aware of their behavior, they can be reluctant to accurately report it to an experimenter. In the case of social categorization, subjects might worry they will look bad if they accurately report classifying someone into a group associated with negative stereotypes. For instance, many racial groups are associated with some negative stereotypes, and subjects may worry that admitting to classifying someone into one of those groups means they believe and use those negative stereotypes.
Social neuroscience has been useful for studying how social categorization occurs without having to rely on self-report measures, instead measuring brain activity differences that occur when people encounter members of different social groups. Much of this work has been recorded using the electroencephalogram, or EEG. EEG is a measure of electrical activity generated by the brain’s neurons. Comparing this electrical activity at a given point in time against what a person is thinking and doing at that same time allows us to make inferences about brain activity associated with specific psychological states. Researchers simply place a cap onto a subject’s head to place the electrodes. The subject can then be asked to think about different topics or engage in different tasks as brain activity is measured.
To study social categorization, subjects are shown pictures of people who belong to different social groups. Brain activity recorded from many individual trials, then averaged together to get an overall idea of how the brain responds when viewing individuals who belong to a particular social group. These studies suggest that social categorization is an automatic process– something that happens with little conscious awareness or control – especially for dimensions like gender, race, and age (Ito & Urland, 2003; Mouchetant-Rostaing & Giard, 2003).
Social categorization has a huge impact on how we perceive the world. Our brain is trying to help us be efficient with this mental shortcut, but in reality this shortcut can hinder our ability to really understand who someone is and to be fully open to their thoughts and ideas.
Hasson, U. (2016). This is your brain on communication. Ted Talk. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDhlOovaGrI&t=886s
