Duke Psychology & Neuroscience

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  • Lasana T. Harris

  • Assistant Professor
  • Psychology and Neuroscience
  • 309 Soc-Psy & B248 LSRC
  • Phone: (919) 660-5790 & 684-1645
  • Homepage

  • Other

    Beatrice Capestany (Lab Manager)

  • Specialties

    • Social Psychology
    • Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience

  • Research Summary

    social cognition, person perception, social decision making, emotion

  • Research Description

    I use a social neuroscience approach to human behavior that combines social psychological theory with neuroscience methodology. I use the tools of cognitive neuroscience such as functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) and facial electromyography (EMG) to address social psychological and philosophical questions. My research interests broadly defined concern the effects of social cognition on affect, cognitive processes, and decision-making. Research in my lab focuses specifically on person perception, prejudice, dehumanization, anthropomorphism, social learning and emotions, and moral decision making.


    Representative Publications
    Harris, L. T., & Fiske, S. T. (2009). Social neuroscience evidence for dehumanised perception. European Review of Social Psychology, 20, 192-231.
    Harris, L. T., & Fiske, S. T. (2008). Brooms in Fantasia: Neural correlates of anthropomorphizing objects. Social Cognition, 26, 209-222
    Harris, L. T., McClure, S., Van den Bos, W., Cohen, J. D., Fiske, S. T. (2007). Regions of MPFC differentially tuned to social and nonsocial affective stimuli. Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, 7, 309-316.
    Harris, L. T., & Fiske, S. T. (2006). Dehumanizing the lowest of the low: Neuro-imaging responses to extreme outgroups. Psychological Science, 17, 847-853.
    Harris, L. T., Todorov, A., & Fiske, S. T. (2005). Attributions on the brain: Neuro-imaging dispositional inferences, beyond Theory of Mind. NeuroImage, 28, 4, 763-769.
    Fiske, S. T., Harris, L. T. & Cuddy, A. J. C. (2004). Why ordinary people torture enemy prisoners. Science, 306, 5701, 1482-1483.

  • Education

      • PhD,
      • Princeton University,
      • 2007

  • Recent Publications

      • L.T. Harris & S.T. Fiske.
      • 2011.
      • Dehumanized perception: A psychological means to facilitate atrocities, torture, and genocide?.
      • Zeitschrift fur Psychologie / Journal of Psychology
      • 219:
      • 175-181
      • .
      Publication Description

      Dehumanized perception, a failure to spontaneously consider the mind of another person, may be a psychological mechanism facilitating inhumane acts like torture. Social cognition—considering someone’s mind—recognizes the other as a human being subject to moral treatment. Social neuroscience has reliably shown that participants normally activate a social cognition neural network to pictures and thoughts of other people; our previous work shows that parts of this network uniquely fail to engage for traditionally dehumanized targets (homeless or drug addicts; see Harris & Fiske, 2009, for review). This suggests participants may not consider these social targets’ minds. Study 1 demonstrates that participants do fail to spontaneously think about the contents of these target’s minds when imagining a day in their life, and rate them differently on a number of human-perception dimensions. Study 2 shows that these human-perception dimension ratings correlate with activation in brain regions beyond the social cognition network, including areas implicated in disgust, attention, and cognitive control. These results suggest that disengaging social cognition affects a number of other brain processes, and hints at some of the complex psychological mechanisms potentially involved in atrocities against humanity.

      • L.T. Harris; S. T. Fiske.
      • 2010.
      • Neural regions that underlie reinforcement learning are also active for social expectancy violations..
      • Social Neuroscience
      • 5:
      • 76-91
      • .
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Lasana T. Harris
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