A mechanistic account of bodily resonance and implicit bias.

ABSTRACT: Implicit social biases play a critical role in shaping our attitudes towards other people. Such biases are thought to arise, in part, from a comparison between features of one's own self-image and those of another agent, a process known as 'bodily resonance'. Recent data have demonstrated that implicit bias can be remarkably plastic, being modulated by brief immersive virtual reality experiences that place participants in a virtual body with features of an out-group member. Here, we provide a mechanistic account of bodily resonance and implicit bias in terms of a putative self-image network that encodes associations between different features of an agent. When subsequently perceiving another agent, the output of this self-image network is proportional to the overlap between their respectiv

SUBMITTER: Bedder RL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6346146 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature