A lay perspective on prioritization for intensive care in pandemic times: Vaccination status matters

During a pandemic, demand for intensive care often exceeds availability. Experts agree that allocation should maximize benefits and must not be based on whether patients could have taken preventive measures. However, intensive care units (ICUs) are often overburdened by individuals with severe COVID-19 who have chosen not to be vaccinated to prevent the disease. This article reports an experiment that investigated the German public’s prioritization preferences during the fourth wave of the coronavirus pandemic (N = 1,014). In a series of scenarios, participants were asked to decide on ICU admission for patients who differed in terms of health condition, expected treatment benefits, and vaccination status. The results reveal an ingroup bias, as vaccinated individuals preferred to allocate more resources to the vaccinated than to the unvaccinated. Participants also favored admitting a heart attack patient rather than a COVID-19 patient with the same likelihood of benefiting from ICU admission, indicating a preference for maintaining regular ICU services rather than treating those with severe COVID-19. Finally, participants were more likely to admit a patient to intensive care when this meant withholding rather than withdrawing care from another patient. The results indicate that lay prioritizations violate established allocation principles, presaging potential conflicts between those in need of intensive care and those who provide and allocate it. It is therefore recommended that allocation principles should be explained to enhance public understanding. Additionally, vaccination rates should be increased to relieve ICUs and reduce the need for such triage decisions.

Ingroup Bias in Healthcare Contexts: Israeli-Jewish Perceptions of Arab and Jewish Doctors

The influence of group membership on perceptions of outgroup members has been extensively studied in various contexts. This research has indicated a strong tendency for ingroup bias – preferring the ingroup over the outgroup. We seek to further expand on the growing literature regarding the effects of group membership within healthcare contexts. Focusing on the Arab-Jewish context in Israel, the present study explored the influence of group membership on Israeli-Jewish participants’ evaluations when exposed to potential malpractice. Specifically, participants (n = 165) read a description of an Israeli-Jewish or Israeli-Arab physician who was either culpable or non-culpable of malpractice. Consistent with our predictions, findings generally indicated more negative evaluations of the Israeli-Arab physician, regardless of objective culpability. We conclude by discussing the study’s limitations and implications.

Adolescent rats extend help to outgroup members, highlighting a neural network for group identity categorization.

Prosocial behavior, in particular helping others in need, occurs preferentially in response to the perceived distress of one's own group members, or ingroup. The development of neural mechanisms underlying social selectivity towards ingroup members are not well established. Here, we used a rat helping behavior test to explore the development and neural basis of ingroup bias for prosocial behavior in adolescent rats. We previously found that adult rats selectively help others from their own social group, and that this selectivity is associated with activation in reward and motivation circuits. Surprisingly, we found that adolescent rats helped both ingroup and outgroup members, evidence suggesting that ingroup bias emerges in adulthood. Analysis of brain-wide neural activity, indexed by expression of the early-immediate gene c-Fos, revealed increased activity for ingroup members across a broad set of regions, which was congruent for adults and adolescents. However, adolescents showed reduced hippocampal and insular activity, and increased orbitofrontal cortex activity compared to adults. Adolescent rats who did not help trapped others also demonstrated increased amygdala connectivity. Together, these findings demonstrate that biases for group-dependent prosocial behavior develop with age in rats and suggest that specific brain regions contribute to this prosocial selectivity, overall pointing to possible targets for the functional modulation of ingroup bias.

Ingroup Projection in American Politics: An Obstacle to Bipartisanship

One potential obstacle to cooperation between political parties is ingroup projection, the tendency for members of subgroups to define superordinate groups based on characteristics of their own ingroups. In five studies spanning 11 years and three presidential administrations, we demonstrated that ingroup projection can be an obstacle that prevents bipartisanship between Republicans and Democrats. Study 1 showed that Americans perceived political ingroups as more prototypical of Americans than outgroups and that the degree of mismatch between the outgroup and the superordinate group was associated with ingroup bias. Studies 2–5 demonstrated that perceiving the outgroup as poorly fitting the prototype of the superordinate group predicted opposition to bipartisan cooperation and a lower likelihood of having engaged in bipartisan behavior (Studies 4 and 5). These studies provide evidence for ingroup projection among American political parties and suggest that it contributes to political polarization.

A Unifying Model of Visual Art Appreciation: The Role of Expertise and Culture

Engagement with art represents one of the few areas in society where people come together to share experiences even when they have radically different worldviews. If all human beings share a common capacity for experiencing and appreciating artworks, it is plausible that the underlying neural and cognitive mechanisms are also common across cultures. But to what extent can art bind us together, and can it transcend boundaries of culture? Or do our in-group biases and preferences persist when watching dance or viewing paintings? Previous research suggests that all individuals show a preference for representational art over abstract art, although this preference is lower for art experts than non-experts. An ingroup bias also exists such that participants from one culture prefer art originating from their own culture compared to from another culture. However, whether the preference for representational art, the ingroup bias, and its modulation by art expertise is consistent and generalisable across cultures and fine and performing arts is not known. In the current study, across two experiments (total N=92 and N=90), we used abstract and representational paintings and dance stimuli of Indian and western origin, and invited Indian and western participants, including painting and dance experts and non-experts to rate art stimuli on beauty and liking. Results suggest that as predicted, a preference for representational art exists (only for paintings) and an ingroup bias exists (only for dance). Both the preference for representational art, and the ingroup bias is modulated by art expertise, such that the preference for representational art is lower in art experts, and the ingroup bias is stronger in non-experts. However, the modulation of art expertise is present only in western participants, and not in Indian participants. Thus, the current findings both inform and constrain understanding of the universality (or not) of aesthetic judgements, and have two major implications: 1) they caution against generalising models of aesthetic appreciation to non-western populations, and across art forms, and 2) they highlight the importance of mere exposure to art as a means of countering ingroup biases and prejudices, evidencing its potential as a medium that binds people together.

The sound of social class: Do music preferences signal status?

In three studies, we explore the subjective construal of associations between music preferences and social class. Two small-scale studies ( N = 100, N = 70) and one study involving a large representative sample of the Italian population ( N = 1,045) reveal that (a) people hold well-defined stereotypes on how music preferences are linked to social class, (b) that these stereotypes do not map onto actual class differences in music taste, (c) that they operate at both an implicit and explicit level, (d) that they are subject to ingroup bias among those who prefer “low-class” genres, and (e) that they are only weakly affected by streaming habits. Together, these findings shed new light on the psychological processes through which people draw inferences about social class on the basis of cultural expression.

Perspective-Taking in Virtual Reality and Reduction of Biases against Minorities

This study examines the effect of perspective-taking via embodiment in virtual reality (VR) in improving biases against minorities. It tests theoretical arguments about the affective and cognitive routes underlying perspective-taking and examines the moderating role of self-presence in VR through experiments. In Study 1, participants embodied an ethnic minority avatar and experienced workplace microaggression from a first-person perspective in VR. They were randomly assigned to affective (focus on emotions) vs. cognitive (focus on thoughts) perspective-taking conditions. Results showed that ingroup bias improved comparably across both conditions and that this effect was driven by more negative perceptions of the majority instead of more positive perceptions of minorities. In Study 2, participants experienced the same VR scenario from the third-person perspective. Results replicated those from Study 1 and extended them by showing that the effect of condition on ingroup bias was moderated by self-presence. At high self-presence, participants in the affective condition reported higher ingroup bias than those in the cognitive condition. The study showed that in VR, the embodiment of an ethnic minority is somewhat effective in improving perceptions towards minority groups. It is difficult to clearly distinguish between the effect of affective and cognitive routes underlying the process of perspective-taking.