Racial stereotypes bias the neural representation of objects towards perceived weapons

DongWon Oh, Henna I. Vartiainen and Jonathan B. Freeman ()
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DongWon Oh: Department of Psychology
Henna I. Vartiainen: Department of Psychology
Jonathan B. Freeman: Department of Psychology

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Abstract Racial stereotypes have been shown to bias the identification of innocuous objects, making objects like wallets or tools more likely to be identified as weapons when encountered in the presence of Black individuals. One mechanism that may contribute to these biased identifications is a transient perceptual distortion driven by racial stereotypes. Here we provide neuroimaging evidence that a bias in visual representation due to automatically activated racial stereotypes may be a mechanism underlying this phenomenon. During fMRI, tools presented after Black face primes induced neural response patterns that exhibited a biased similarity to independent gun images in object-discriminative regions of the ventral temporal cortex involved in the visual perception of objects. Moreover, these neural representational shifts predicted the magnitude of participants’ racial bias, as reflected by differences in response times during weapon identification due to Black versus White face primes. Together, these findings suggest that stereotypes can shape the visual representation of socially-relevant objects in line with preconceived notions, thereby contributing to racially biased responding.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-63381-7

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