21/02/19
Speaker: Tiago Bortolini, PhD. Postdoctoral researcher at the Cognitive and Neuroinformatic Unit at the D'Or Institute for Research and Education - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Group belongingness is a basic human need. Humans are attached not only to own kin but also to non-kin cultural groups, like nations, religious groups and football clubs. Although this is an important characteristic of our species, we are far from a consensus regarding the psychometrical dimensions of group belongingness and the neurobiology behind it. Our lab has been studying these topics using football fans as a model of a highly significant cultural group. In this talk, I'll present studies in which we investigated group belongingness through psychometric and functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) techniques. In Study 1, we showed the validity of different constructs (i.e. group identification, identity fusion and entitativity) related to different cultural groups in a Brazilian sample. In Study 2 we tested a hypothesis, that hooliganism is typically motivated by a parochial form of prosociality. In a survey of Brazilian football fans (N = 465), results suggest that fan violence is fostered by intense social cohesion (identity fusion) combined with perceptions of chronic outgroup threats. In study 3 we investigated the neural mechanisms underlying ingroup altruistic behavior in male football fans using event-related fMRI. We designed an effort measure based on handgrip strength to assess the motivation to earn money (i) for oneself, (ii) for anonymous ingroup fans, or (iii) for a neutral group of anonymous non-fans. While overlapping valuation signals in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) were observed for the three conditions, the subgenual cingulate cortex (SCC) exhibited increased functional connectivity with the mOFC as well as stronger hemodynamic responses for ingroup versus outgroup decisions.