Lasana T. Harris, Faculty
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Faculty |
Research Summary:
My unique training in social psychology, affective and cognitive neuroscience, and philosophy of mind, provides me with a comprehensive research strategy to explore dehumanization. I use the tools of neuroscience such as functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) and facial electromyography (EMG) to address social psychological questions. This social neuroscience approach to human behavior combines social psychological theory with neuroscience methodology. My research interests include person perception, prejudice, dehumanization, anthropomorphism, social learning and emotions, and punishment.
Dehumanization: How do we see people as less than human?
My work on dehumanized perception argues that dehumanization, a perceptual phenomenon, occurs when a perceiver fails to immediately consider the mind of a target. Extreme social out-groups (e.g. homeless people, drug addicts in U.S. samples) are perceived low on the fundamental person-perception trait dimensions warmth and competence, and elicit disgust and contempt. My research has shown that a part of the brain that responds when we perceive people and assign value disengages when we perceive traditionally dehumanized targets. This finding raises the question about a mechanism present during person perception that may account for the phenomenon, such as the cognitive act of mentalizing and the affect triggered by people. My current research explores these two mechanisms, focusing on social and affective learning.
Changing Social Affect: How do we modulate affective responses to people?
I use neural models of emotion and emotion regulation to attempt to change disgust reactions to dehumanized targets. My work tries to change disgust responses with emotion regulation strategies that increase mentalizing toward these targets. So far, I have used two approaches to change disgust reactions, namely avoidance behavior and cognitive emotion regulation. Using the first approach, I show that participants escape viewing dehumanized targets when given the opportunity as a regulation strategy. My other work shows that cognitive behavioral therapy is a viable emotion regulatory tool for cognitive restructuring of thoughts about dehumanized targets. Because dehumanized perception occurs spontaneously but is malleable, my work tries to ameliorate the affective responses by teaching participants to infer the internal mental states of these actors.
Moral Decisions Making: How do we decide right and wrong?
These projects represent my neuroeconomic and legal studies interests. Using traditional economic games, I design studies to investigate if moral violators are punished differently, and if mentalizing processes moderate these effects. I measure punishment in the context of social interaction, and examine the neural correlates of this behavior. Thus far, my research suggests that the affect elicited by all social targets in an interaction modulates punishment decisions. Current research continues to explore the role of social emotions in moral decision making, looking at how helping behavior and mental state inferences are affected by these emotions as well as past experiences that may have taught participants how to respond to different entities in the social world.
Anthropomorphism: How do we see non-human objects as human beings?
Humanness seems to be malleable because people can take away human attributes like mental life from other people, but imbue mental lives to animals and objects. Participants make internal attributions to objects for behavior just as readily as they do to people. My research shows that separate yet overlapping neural networks are involved when people make internal attributions to people and objects. This suggests that though humanness may be malleable, the brain represents the process both with similar and different neural structures depending on the target. My current anthropomorphism studies further investigate these similarities and differences using a social neuroscience approach to uncover the unique functions of these regions in the attribution of human mental qualities to the objects in motion, pets, and the environment.
Representative Publications
Harris, L. T., & Fiske, S. T. (2009). Social neuroscience evidence for dehumanised perception. European Review of Social Psychology, 20, 192-231.
Harris, L. T., & Fiske, S. T. (2008). Brooms in Fantasia:
Neural correlates of anthropomorphizing objects. Social Cognition, 26, 209-222
Harris, L. T., McClure, S., Van den Bos, W., Cohen, J. D., Fiske, S. T. (2007). Regions of MPFC differentially tuned to social and nonsocial affective stimuli. Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, 7, 309-316.
Harris, L. T., & Fiske, S. T. (2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low: Neuro-imaging responses to extreme outgroups. Psychological Science, 17, 847-853.
Harris, L. T., Todorov, A., & Fiske, S. T. (2005).
Attributions on the brain: Neuro-imaging dispositional inferences, beyond Theory of Mind. NeuroImage, 28, 4, 763-769.
Fiske, S. T., Harris, L. T. & Cuddy, A. J. C. (2004).
Why ordinary people torture enemy prisoners. Science, 306, 5701, 1482-1483.