Share the wealth: Neurophysiological and motivational mechanisms related to racial discrimination in economic decision making

Social interactions are influenced by rapid judgements about interaction partners that are assumed to contribute to various behavioral biases. While often negligible in a given instance, such biases can accumulate to contribute to persistent inequities between social groups. Here, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine the extent to which early attention to racial category information during simulated interpersonal interactions contributes to race bias in financial decisions. Undergraduate participants (N = 67; 36 women, 31 men; all White/Non-Hispanic) completed an economic decision-making task in which they decided how much money to invest in a series of male interaction partners (i.e., trustees) who varied in their apparent racial group memberships. Black male trustees received lower investments than White male trustees, replicating prior findings. Of greater interest, an ERP index of attention to trustees' faces predicted racial bias in investments, and was moderated by participants' internalized motivation to respond without prejudice (i.e., a difference score reflecting the extent to which participants' motivation reflected internal [e.g., personal egalitarian values] compared to external [e.g., concerns about social norms] reasons to respond without prejudice). Consistent with motivational models of prejudice control, greater early attention to a trustee's face led to more-biased lending among participants with lower internalized motivation but to less-biased lending among participants with higher internalized motivation. Findings demonstrate a crucial role for within-person variability in attention to race-related cues when interacting with others, along with between-person bias regulation motives, in determining whether attention to race will increase or decrease bias in financial lending.