When Group Grievances Become Personal: Dissociating the Neural Correlates of Group and Personal Discrimination

Witnessing discrimination against one’s group can have similar impacts on psychological distress, aggression, and extreme pro-group action as experiencing rejection personally. However, the effects of group discrimination on brain activity, and whether they resemble those caused by personal rejection, have yet to be examined. We investigated neural activity patterns in response to group discrimination. To do this, we first identified the neural correlates of social discrimination (explicit and systematic rejection) compared to ostracism (lack of social connection) and then compared group-level discrimination to personal-level discrimination. We employed a novel social discrimination task, “RateME,” to induce feelings of group and personal discrimination, and used Cyberball to evoke feelings of ostracism during fMRI scans. Our results showed that personal discrimination activated brain regions associated with autobiographical memory and self-identity, such as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and the lingual gyrus, while ostracism engaged areas related to social pain and salience, including the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula. Additionally, group and personal-level discrimination elicited similar neural activity patterns, regardless of participants’ level of identification with the discriminated groups. Therefore, mere group membership seems sufficient for group discrimination to trigger self-referential processing pathways similar to those activated by personal discrimination. Our findings highlight the overlapping neural mechanisms underlying personal and group-level grievances, which may explain the detrimental effects of group discrimination on aggression, violent extremism, and inter-group conflict.