On the neural implausibility of the modular mind: Evidence for distributed construction dissolves boundaries between perception, cognition, and emotion.

Firestone & Scholl (F&S) rely on three problematic assumptions about the mind (modularity, reflexiveness, and context-insensitivity) to argue cognition does not fundamentally influence perception. We highlight evidence indicating that perception, cognition, and emotion are constructed through overlapping, distributed brain networks characterized by top-down activity and context-sensitivity. This evidence undermines F&S's ability to generalize from case studies to the nature of perception.

The Politics of Affirmation Theory: When Group-Affirmation Leads to Greater Ingroup Bias.

It has been well established in the literature that affirming the individual self reduces the tendency to exhibit group-favoring biases. The limited research examining group-affirmation and bias, however, is inconclusive. We argue that group-affirmation can exacerbate group-serving biases in certain contexts, and in the current set of studies, we document this phenomenon directly. Unlike self-affirmation, group-affirmation led to greater ingroup-favoring evaluative judgments among political partisans (Experiment 1). This increase in evaluative bias following group-affirmation was moderated by political party identification and was not found among those who affirmed a non-political ingroup (Experiment 2). In addition, the mechanism underlying these findings is explored and interpreted within the theoretical frameworks of self-categorization theory and the multiple self-aspects model (Experiments 2 and 3). The broader implications of our findings for the understanding of social identity and affirmation theory are discussed.