A Face for the Faces We Meet

 The Neurocognitive Basis of Bias Against People Who Look Different

Summary: Neuroimaging revealed when people saw an anomalous face, the fusiform gyri and amygdala showed significant neural responses. Activity in a region of the left amygdala, which correlated with less pro-social responses to the anomalous face, appeared to relate to the participant’s belief about justice in the world and their degree of empathetic concern.

The neuroimaging findings are consistent with a mountain of literature finding that facial disfigurement has many negative consequences. I've been sitting on this for weeks letting various ideas float through my mind during the interminable hours of insomnia. 

With dawn approaching I kept pondering the issue of discrimination and came to the conclusion that discrimination is a very broad idea. For my purposes I created some basic categories because I believe there are some very important differences in how discrimination is expressed and experienced. In order of severity the categories are:

1. Group based discrimination(race, ethnicity, religion).
2. Sex based discrimination.
3. Behavioral based discrimination(psychiatric conditions, being non-neurotypical, non-conformist, and eccentric).
4. Facial disfigurement.

Keep in mind that "severity" is very individual and culturally contingent. Some, though not many, can brush off discrimination but there are negative implications. Cultures can very much change how much discrimination is expressed and how it is expressed. I will latter offer explanations for the the above categories and discrimination is expressed and experienced in those categories. 

A Very Brief Overview on Facial Disfigurement Research

The literature on this is vast so I cannot do it justice here. The highlights will suffice. 

A very good aspect of the above study is the large number of participants(403). This I can heartily attest to being my experience:

However, participants in the highest tier of socioeconomic status, compared to the others, were significantly less pro-social towards anomalous-looking people.

The fusiform responses are expected, a  key face recognition area in the brain. The amygdala responses appear identical to the responses found in studies on race based discrimination. That needs to be qualified though because in those studies subliminal exposure(without conscious awareness) produced the amygdala response but with conscious awareness an inhibitory impulse to the amygdala from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex(simply: concept regulation and manipulation region) moderated the innate response and in some individuals no doubt eliminated it though of course in asshole groups like white supremacist and other disgusting groups that inhibitory impulse is probably absent and there may even be regions(the insula?) elevating the amygdala response. In this study on facial disfigurement though a key difference is present:

Participants also acknowledged harboring “explicit bias” reflected in negative expectations about people with anomalous faces as a group.

Why is this so? To the credit of many nations there has been a decades long fight against various forms of discrimination. People are inculcated with values that mitigate against the expression of racism. Perhaps more importantly though is that since World War 2 the world has become much more of a "melting pot". For example in my country Australia there are a very sizeable percentage of citizens(29.7%) born overseas. So from a very young age Aussie kids became used to mixing with people from differing backgrounds. Of course racism still exists here. An old study made an interesting argument that childhood\teenage exposure to people of differing backgrounds was an effective means to reduce the prevalence of racist attitudes. Thus the segregationist policies in the USA perpetuated racism. 

There has also been strident efforts to reduce discrimination based on religion, being female, sexual orientation, and those with mental health. Facial disfigurement has not been subject to same cultural initiatives. Hence in the British Medical Journal, April 5, 1997, there is the editorial:

Facial disfigurement: The last bastion of discrimination

D A McGrouther

Professor of plastic surgery

The Professor makes some interesting points:

Victims of society's cultural attack may simply adopt a defensive style of behaviour.

Of course they do, if you are perceived as a threat that is the rational response. 

Negative coping strategies may include avoidance of social contact, alcohol misuse, and aggression, but these patients are not “psychiatric.”

Yet as Dr. Whittington noted:

Of course there were the prejudices and biases that happened such that most people on seeing his appearance would regard him as mentally deficient, retarded and more likely to make unfavourable conclusions about his personality and character

I was referred to him because some rather below average psychologists at the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service had deemed me a psychiatric case. Amazingly after receiving a rebuttal of that claim from the psychiatrist one of them said to me, "we should seek another diagnosis". How's that for discrimination from a government department!? 

dissatisfaction with appear­ance seems to be a factor in many suicides.

That is not surprising in a culture which places so much emphasis on physical appearance. If a person doesn't look even normal there is almost automatic exclusion from belonging.  

Society at large must also be educated to under­ stand disfigurement and deformity

Written in 1997. Nothing has changed.

Therefore no compensating inhibitory impulse from the dorsolaterals. Hence the explicit bias exists, hence society still deems it acceptable to demonise the facially disfigured, a prominent example being how often the evil dude on the screen has facial disfigurement. 

I am not confident about the social interventions because there is a very strong innate bias. So strong that in one study, unfortunately of very small sample size, it was found that even mothers of children with facial disfigurement spent less time nurturing those children. In some cases the result will be emotional neglect which is clearly implicated in lifelong mood dysregulation. 

Another striking piece of research relates to employment opportunities. Sarah Stevenage et. al found ... 

Model applicants: The effect of facial appearance on recruitment decisions
December 2010British Journal of Psychology 90(2):221 - 234

 The results indicated a marked negative perception of the applicant with the facial disfigurement but no main effect of a physical disability, for both personal qualities and job skills. In addition, analysis of the recruitment decisions of the students suggested that while the possession of a physical disability significantly reduced the chances of being selected, the possession of a facial disfigurement had a far greater negative impact.

If you have facial disfigurement don't choose occupations with a heavy emphasis on face to face duties. 

Nonetheless I still place it at the bottom of the severity list. People with facial disfigurement don't form into groups and hence do not represent a threat to the status quo. If anything they are largely removed from society and keep out of harm's way. So whereas other forms of discrimination can result in violence, people with facial disfigurement are more objects of pity and derision rather than threats to be countered. 

Group Based Discrimination

Robert Sapolsky offers an interesting parallel with the findings on the amygdala response. People wearing insignia from opposing sporting teams will display the same response. It isn't just about race or ethnicity or religion, it is about group identity. Group identity is a key feature in the first two forms of discrimination I mentioned above.

It is often claimed that human beings are a very violent species. Idiosyncratic violence is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. Primates are prone to group based violence but it is still relatively rare except in humans. There have been various cultural initiatives to reduce levels of violence in society. Religion is often a binding factor but that is a double edged sword because while it promotes group co-operation it reduces out group co-operations. Incidentally the same true for the so called love hormone oxytocin.

Race, ethnic, and tribal based discrimination is as old as humanity, possibly even present in Homo Heidelbergensis and Neandertals. An anthropologist stated that in his experience hunter gatherer tribes often regards themselves as the true humans the other tribes being sub-humans. The Abrahamic religions elevates that to new heights by arguing they are the Chosen Ones of God. Yep, all three of them, well at least that is consistent with the concept of The Trinity, which is of course inconsistent with Judaism , Islam, and also split the Christian Church(Arianism).

A single person, a stranger in a strange land, is not a threat to the group. All for one and all for The Group! Group identity is deeply ingrained in our self-image. There are even findings from Port Howieson and Blombos Cave in southern Africa, going back some 70,000 years, that strongly suggest people were already wearing personal ornaments(beads, dyes) which may have served as a means of identifying friend from foe. We don't know of course but there are a plethora of personal insignia for group identification purposes in the present and the past.

Group based discrimination is the major driver of violence in human societies. Our problem is not that we are a violent species, our problem is we are a group identity obsessed species.

Sex Based Discrimination

I don't understand the intensity of sex based discrimination. Some people become very hot and bothered by fact that there are people with sexual orientations that make no biological sense. The evolutionary psychology based explanations are at best weak. I tend to regard these individuals are statistical outliers(not evolutionary psychologists, they are just strange😄). All human traits are subject to twist and turns at the tails of the distribution.  I've known a few but have never met a violent homosexual, lesbian, cross dresser, or trans sexual. I'm more worried about the macho drunk on the bus and obviously looking to cause trouble. Heterosexual men are far more dangerous than non-heterosexuals of any category. Yet we celebrate the tough man, some women like the "bad boy", and heterosexual men are by far the most violent set of individuals. 

For reasons beyond my understanding many seem to perceive non heterosexuals as a threat to their group. There is something else though, I don't what that it is, but the violence and hatred comes from a very deep and powerful source. Freud was onto something when he argued how central sex is to our identity. Perhaps any deviation from heterosexuality represents a threat to our sexual identity and hence our whole identity. 

Behavior Based Discrimination

The main category here is for those with psychiatric conditions. It is not surprising that schizophrenics and autists have distressingly high rates of suicide. There are some increasingly successful cultural campaigns to reduce discrimination for non-neurotypicals but it remains a very long road to address that challenge. There are still too many people who think those with behavioral disorders are prone to violence, are unemployable, and not to be trusted. Woe betide those who wish to genetically eliminate such individuals from society. Apart from absurdly ridiculously idea that is even possible we would be doing society a grievous harm because the genes for schizophrenia and autism showing striking correlations with higher intelligence and giftedness. Even Kanner noted that many autists came from professional parents in highly professional occupations.

Roy Richard Grinker makes a very important point when states that autism is two conditions: the intrinsic condition and the "stigma and exclusion society attaches to it". (Unstrange Minds: Remapping the world of autism)

It is shocking to look into the recent history of how those with psychiatric conditions were housed and "cared" for. Locked away in institutions, chained like animals, lacking proper nutrition and emotional involvement. Out of sight, out of society's way, let's just have a white picket fence and no strange children that make us feel uncomfortable and who will grow up to rape our daughters and kill our sons or vice versa.   

We can see various group insignia every time we walk out the door, we can see those of a non-heterosexual orientation living very different lives, going to specific clubs and often displaying distinctive behaviors. Not quite like a group but close enough. 

What makes behavioral based  discrimination different from group based discrimination is that the former never coalesces into a distinct group. There aren't night clubs and hang outs for those with different behaviors arising from biological factors. So each individual never represents a threat to the group. 

Finally

Broadly stated it appears that the severity of discrimination correlates with the discrimination arising from group identification and the potential threat an outlier group may represent to the status quo.