A study looks at the negative impact of stereotyping on personal motivation.
It may be that the United States is confronting its long history of racism and discrimination as never before. For many people in the U.S., there is a growing recognition that people of color and those belonging to marginalized groups are confronted on a daily basis with a society that undermines them.
A new study from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) suggests that for those on the receiving end of such discriminatory attitudes, dealing with negative stigmatization may actually alter how the brain functions.
In the new UCSB study, exposure to negative stereotyping changed the behavior of the subcortical nucleus accumbens, a brain area associated with the anticipation of reward and punishment.
According to one of the study’s authors, social psychologist Kyle Ratner, “What we’re seeing today is a close examination of the hardships and indignities that people have faced for a very long time because of their race and ethnicity.”
“It is clear that people who belong to historically marginalized groups in the U.S. contend with burdensome stressors on top of the everyday stressors that members of nondisadvantaged groups experience. For instance, there is the trauma of overt racism, stigmatizing portrayals in the media and popular culture, and systemic discrimination that leads to disadvantages in many domains of life, from employment and education to healthcare and housing to the legal system.”
— Kyle Ratner, UCSB
The paper features in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Ratner and his colleagues decided to investigate the effect of negative stereotyping on brain processing in Latinx UCSB students, specifically Mexican American students. In their paper, the authors note that Mexican American people r