Opinion
Changing bodies changes minds: owning another body affects social cognition

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2014.11.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Multisensory correlations can induce illusory ownership of another person's body.

  • Ownership can thus be induced over a body of a different race, age, or gender.

  • Incorporating a body belonging to a social outgroup changes implicit social biases.

  • The multisensory experience of the body underpins higher-level social attitudes.

Research on stereotypes demonstrates how existing prejudice affects the way we process outgroups. Recent studies have considered whether it is possible to change our implicit social bias by experimentally changing the relationship between the self and outgroups. In a number of experimental studies, participants have been exposed to bodily illusions that induced ownership over a body different to their own with respect to gender, age, or race. Ownership of an outgroup body has been found to be associated with a significant reduction in implicit biases against that outgroup. We propose that these changes occur via a process of self association that first takes place in the physical, bodily domain as an increase in perceived physical similarity between self and outgroup member. This self association then extends to the conceptual domain, leading to a generalization of positive self-like associations to the outgroup.

Section snippets

Body representations of self and other

Embodied accounts of social cognition suggest that the way in which we perceive others’ bodies in relation to our own plays a crucial role in sociocognitive processing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. The perception of bodily states in others can activate similar bodily states in the self, and this is taken as evidence that our representations of our own bodies and those of others can partially overlap. These shared body representations are thought to form the fundamental basis of empathy and our

Racial biases in brain, behaviour, and the body

A rapidly growing literature suggests that the body is central to our understanding of others. Neurocognitive studies into the ‘mirror neuron system’ have shown that we activate similar brain regions both when we observe a bodily state in others, and when we experience that bodily state ourselves [17], reflecting an overlap between self and other bodily representations in the brain [18]. Evidence now suggests that this bodily resonance (see Glossary) can afford us a unique, first-person

From body ownership to social cognition: constraints and consequences

Over the past 20 years, advances in experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience and virtual reality have allowed scientists to experiment with a fundamental element of self-awareness, the sense of body ownership, using a range of bodily illusions, such as the Rubber Hand Illusion [22], the Full Body Illusion 23, 24, 25 and the Enfacement Illusion [26] (Box 1). These successful manipulations aptly demonstrated the malleability of the mental representation of one's body and identity.

Having

Changing your body changes your mind

Although changes in body ownership were found to affect social processing of ‘embodied’ individuals, the question of whether these changes could affect implicit biases against outgroups remained unanswered. In the first study to test this [9], participants’ implicit racial attitudes were measured before and after they experienced a Rubber Hand Illusion with a hand of a different racial group (see Figure 1). To begin, light-skinned Caucasian participants completed a skin colour IAT to assess

Illusions of self-resemblance may cause a generalisation of self-like associations to an outgroup

How can a change in the perception of a purely bodily aspect of the self ultimately alter not only associations with a higher-level concept of the self [11], but also generalize to the affective and social processing of others? We argue that these changes occur via a process of self association, first in the physical, bodily domain as an increase in perceived physical similarity between self and outgroup member, and then in the conceptual domain, leading to a generalization of positive

Concluding remarks

Overall, an intriguing and consistent pattern of results has emerged from independent research groups, whereby changes in the experience of ownership over an outgroup body of different race results in significant reductions of the levels of implicit bias against that outgroup. Furthermore, similar changes are elicited in measures of somatosensory remapping [14] that reflect levels of body resonance between people. Taken together, these findings suggest that changes in the perceived similarity

Acknowledgements

M.T. is supported by the European Research Council (ERC-2010-StG-262853) under the FP7, and the European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences and Humanities of the Volkswagen Foundation. M.S. and M.V.S-V. are supported by the European Union FP7 Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Integrated Project VERE (#257695), and the European Union FP7 ICT Integrated Project BEAMING (#248620). M.S. is supported by the European Research Council ERC Advanced Grant TRAVERSE (#227985), the FP7 European

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