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Deep Bias: Examining the Cognitive and Physiological Underpinnings of Intergroup Prejudice

Project description

Uncovering deep mechanisms of biases

Fuelled by prejudice and discrimination, intergroup conflict is a global phenomenon and one that has resulted in the worst tragedies in our history. Yet, modern interventions based on motivational theories have done little to reduce prejudice. A fresh understanding of the deep mechanisms of prejudices is needed. With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie programme, the EU-funded DeepBias project will use cutting-edge cognitive and physiological measures to advance our understanding of the sources of individual differences in prejudice. It will take a fundamentally different approach to researching intergroup prejudices. It will study how individual differences in implicit sensitivity to threat shape an individual’s prejudice.

Objective

Intergroup prejudice gives rise to some of the darkest aspects of human behavior, including discrimination, violence, and inequality. In recent years, the harmful repercussions of intergroup prejudice have become increasingly evident, with the global rise of populist, far-right political movements centered largely on the exclusion of ethnic and religious minority groups. But what factors shape an individual’s degree of prejudice, and why do some people generally tend to develop greater animosity toward social outgroups? The state-of-the-art typically explains individual differences in prejudice via complex attitudinal and motivational factors (e.g. political conservatism, need for closure). However, the deeper cognitive and physiological underpinnings of prejudice remain largely unexplored.
This gap in our theoretical understanding also has important practical implications: recent analyses suggest that most prejudice-reduction interventions – based on the current leading theoretical perspectives – have little or no effect, and can at times even increase prejudice. Taken together, these trends reveal that there is a pressing need for research that can provide a deeper understanding of the sources of prejudice, to fill this theoretical gap and help develop effective prejudice-reduction interventions and other means of countering bias.
In this Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action, called “DeepBias,” I take a fundamentally different approach to the study of intergroup prejudice, examining how individual differences in implicit (i.e. nonconscious, uncontrollable) sensitivity to threat shape an individual’s prejudice. In this work – building on recent pilot data I have collected in preparation for this MSCA – I utilize cutting-edge cognitive and physiological measures to advadvance our understanding of the sources of individual differences in prejudice beyond abstract beliefs and motivations to identify the lower-level biological and psychological sources of prejudice.

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

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MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2019

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 187 572,48
Address
RAPENBURG 70
2311 EZ Leiden
Netherlands

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Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 187 572,48
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