ABSTRACT
It seems strangely difficult to imagine now, but it was not very long ago when only a tiny minority of social psychologists used any kind of psychophysiological or neuroimaging measures in their research programs. Even those who did so probably had no idea that they were at the forefront of what would become a major force within the field. If we can consider the social neuroscience movement to be a “new dawn” of inquiry, in which social and biological approaches to understanding social behavior have been integrated in a theoretically rich and meaningful way (and one that has been recognized as important by a majority of the field), then it was in the hazy early morning hours of this new dawn that I took my first tentative steps onto the trail blazed by pioneers such as John Cacioppo, Jim Blascovich, and their collaborators. In this chapter, I will present a brief overview of my experience as a social psychologist utilizing psychophysiological measures to study the mental events that give rise to social behaviors, focusing on racial categorization and bias. The main focus of this chapter will be on recent work in which my colleagues and I have investigated the extent to which performance on tasks measuring implicit bias is driven by cognitive conflict and control processes. However, I begin with a story of how I first came to use psychophysiological measures to address a longstanding question in person perception, an experience that formed the foundation of my excitement about the possibilities of social cognitive neuroscience.
