Seeing “us vs. them”: Minimal group effects on the neural encoding of faces

Faces are inherently social, but the extent to which social group information affects early face processing remains unknown. To address this issue, we examined cortical activity associated with structural encoding of novel ingroup vs. outgroup faces. Participants were assigned to one of two arbitrarily-defined groups using the minimal group procedure, and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants categorized faces of...