Shifting racial identities reduces racial ingroup biases in empathy and altruistic decision-making

People usually give priorities to same-race over other-race individuals in cognition, emotion, and behavior. Reducing the racial biases requires understanding of their psychological and brain mechanisms. To investigate the functional role of people’s racial identities in racial ingroup favoritism in social emotion and prosocial behavior, we examined whether monoracial adults’ racial identities may be shifted toward a different one to reduce their racial ingroup biases in empathy and altruistic decision-making. We developed a short-term training procedure to shift Chinese adults’ racial identities from Asian toward White by inducing visual-motor-tactile synchrony between a participant’s body and a wearing White facial disguise. In seven behavioral, EEG, and fMRI experiments we showed converging evidence that the training procedure shifted Chinese adults’ racial identities from Asian toward White and the shifted identity was associated with increased medial prefrontal activity involved in self-reflection. Moreover, racial (vs. personal) identity shift led to increased electrophysiological responses to perceived pain expressions of White faces, enhanced right premotor/inferior frontal/insular responses to perceived painful stimulation applied to Whites, and decreased Asian favoritism in altruistic decision-making. Our findings highlight the malleability of monoracial adults’ racial identities, which establishes a basis for interventions of racial discrimination in social emotion and prosocial behavior.