Lasana T Harris

Duke University | DU · Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

Studies of cognitive reappraisal have demonstrated that reinterpreting a stimulus can alter emotional responding, yet few studies have examined the durable effects associated with reinterpretation-based emotion regulation strategies. Evidence for the enduring effects of emotion regulation may be found in clinical studies that use cognitive restruct...

Dehumanized perception, a failure to spontaneously consider the mind of another person, may be a psychological mechanism facilitating inhumane acts like torture. Social cognition–considering someone’s mind–recognizes the other as a human being subject to moral treatment. Social neuroscience has reliably shown that participants normally activate a s...

Prediction error, the difference between an expected and an actual outcome, serves as a learning signal that interacts with reward and punishment value to direct future behavior during reinforcement learning. We hypothesized that similar learning and valuation signals may underlie social expectancy violations. Here, we explore the neural correlates...

Using moral dilemmas, we (i) investigate whether stereotypes motivate people to value ingroup lives over outgroup lives and (ii) examine the neurobiological correlates of relative social valuation using fMRI. Saving ingroup members, who seem warm and competent (e.g. Americans), was most morally acceptable in the context of a dilemma where one perso...

Social psychology has argued that social factors influence some evil behavior (Fiske, et al., 2004). Obedience to authority (Milgram, 1974), conformity (Asch, 1948), and other forms of social influence (Darley & Latane, 1968; Zimbardo, 1971) cause people to unknowingly and unwillingly behave immorally. Nonetheless, punish decisions are motivated by...

Dehumanisation describes perceiving a person as nonhuman in some ways, such as lacking a mind. Social psychology is beginning to understand cognitive and affective causes and mechanisms—the psychological how and why of dehumanisation. Social neuroscience research also can inform these questions. After background on social neural networks and on pas...

People show medial prefrontal cortex and superior temporal sulcus (STS) activation when making dispositional. attributions to other people (Harris, Todorov, & Fiske, 2005) under conditions predicted by Kelley's (1972) ANOVA model. Here, participants make dispositional attributions to entire categories of objects under similar conditions; they also...

This chapter argues that social emotions derived from power and perceived social status generate a skewed perception of the out-group, resulting in residual negative affect and the creation of a vertical distance, which in turn hinders intergroup reconciliation. Literature within social psychology that describes intergroup power as outcome control,...

The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) reliably activates in social cognition and reward tasks. This study locates distinct areas for each. Participants made evaluative (positive/negative) or social (person/not a person) judgments of pictured positive or negative people and objects in a slow event-related design. Activity in an anterior rostral region...

In recent studies, various regions of the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) have been implicated in at least two potentially different mental functions: reasoning about the minds of other people (social cognition) and processing reward related information (affective evaluation). In this study, we test whether the activation in a specific are...

Social neuroscience suggests medial pre-frontal cortex (mPFC) as necessary for social cognition. However, the mPFC activates less to members of extreme outgroups that elicit disgust, an emotion directed toward both people and objects. This study aimed to counteract that effect. Participants made either superficial categorical age estimations or ind...

Traditionally, prejudice has been conceptualized as simple animosity. The stereotype content model (SCM) shows that some prejudice is worse. The SCM previously demonstrated separate stereotype dimensions of warmth (low-high) and competence (low-high), identifying four distinct out-group clusters. The SCM predicts that only extreme out-groups, group...

Social neuroscience, often viewed as studying the neural foundations of social cognition, has roots in multiple disciplines. This paper argues that it needs a firmer base in social psychology. First, we outline some major opportunities from social psychology--the power of social context and social motives in shaping human behavior. Second, as the s...

People need to predict what other people will do, and the other person's perceived disposition is the preferred mode of prediction. People less often use, for example, shared social norms to explain another person's behavior. Social psychology's last half-century of research on attribution theory offers precise, validated paradigms for testing how...

Accounts of prisoner abuse and other institutional violence often blame a few isolated individuals, but social psychology emphasizes social contexts, which can make almost anyone oppress, conform, and obey in abetting destructive social behavior. In this Policy Forum, meta-analyses demonstrate the quantitative reliability and import of social conte...

Narrative theories of personality help elucidate the complexity of success.

Portions of this chapter are reprinted and adapted with permission from Fiske, S. T. (2000). Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination at the seam between the centuries: Evolution, culture, mind, and brain. European Journal of Social Psychology, 30, 299-322. In July 1999, the Oxford meeting of the European Association of Experimental Social Psych...