The Neural Underpinnings of Intergroup Social Cognition: An fMRI Meta-Analysis.

Roughly twenty years of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have investigated the neural correlates underlying engagement in social cognition (e.g., empathy, emotion perception) about targets spanning various social categories (e.g., race, gender). Yet findings from individual studies remain mixed. In the present quantitative functional neuroimaging meta-analysis, we summarized across 50 fMRI studies of social cognition to identify consistent differences in neural activation as a function of whether the target of social cognition was an ingroup or outgroup member. We investigated if such differences varied according to social category (i.e., race) and social cognitive process (i.e., empathy, emotion perception). We found that social cognition about ingroup members was more reliably related to activity in brain regions associated with mentalizing (e.g., dmPFC), whereas social cognition about outgroup members was more reliably related to activity in regions associated with exogenous attention and salience (e.g., anterior insula). These findings replicated for studies specifically focused on the social category of race, and we further found intergroup differences in neural activation during empathy and emotion perception tasks. These results help shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition across group lines.