Lecture 11 Flashcards
McGuire et al. (1979) showed the salience of minority. He asked participants that lived in households wherein they were the minority or majority gender, or in households that contained an equal amount of members of both genders, how frequently they spontaneously mention their gender.
Results: Participants that had the minority gender mentioned their gender more spontaneously than those from equal gender households (because minorities stand out more). The study was replicated for ethnicity.
Study by Tajfel to demonstrate ingroup bias/ingroup favouritism, the minimal group paradigm: participants were divided up into groups based on wether they liked a Klee or Kandinsky painting more. The members had no face-to-face contact.
Results: ingroup favouritism/bias still occurred (so, even in minimal groups), participants gave members of their ingroup more points than members of the outgroup. The effect stopped existing when the experiment was over.
Linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) experiment: 80 hunters and 80 environmentalists evaluated 8 cartoons in which a hunter or an environmentalists did something positive or something negative. The participants were given 4 descriptions (varying levels of abstractness), and had to choose the ones fitting the cartoons best.
Results: positive ingroup behaviours were assigned more abstract descriptions than positive outgroup behaviours.
Study by Smith et al. (1998) on groups and respect. There was an ingroup or an outgroup experimenter that wore a shirt of the own vs another university. The experimenter would either give high or low treatment quality to a participant. How respected did the participants feel?
Results: treatment from ingroup members is more important than treatment from outgroup members. Ingroup members felt more respected in the high treatment quality condition from the ingroup experimenter than from the outgroup experimenter, and the other way around; people felt less respected by the low treatment quality of the ingroup experimenter than the outgroup experimenter.
Marques et al (1988) study on ingroup-deviants (black sheep effect): Belgian students had to read a story about a Belgian or North-African student. The student was either likeable or unlikeable. The participants would then had to evaluate the personality of the student.
Results: ingroup members that we do not like are more unlikeable than outgroup members we do not like. The unlikeable Belgian student (ingroup) was disliked more than the unlikeable North-African student (outgroup).
Experiment on peripheral members and outgroups: participants were divided into central and peripheral group members. Participants then had to choose persuasion techniques to persuade central or peripheral members, these varied in aggressiveness. Techniques could be either executed in private (other members do not know choice) or in public (discuss choice with fellow group members)
Results: peripheral members would more often choose a public aggressive strategy to demonstrate to other members how committed they are to the group. Central members more often went for the private condition, as they would feel like having much less to prove.
Experiment by Greenberg et al. (1990) on mortality salience: participants would either get questions on a topic related to death, or on another topic unrelated to death (control). Afterwards, participants had to evaluate an interview about the US political system (very positive, mixed, very negative).
Results: the mortality condition were much more positive about the person in the interview (as wanting to feel part of the US political system, increased desire to belong > symbolic immortality), whereas the participants from the control condition gave ratings of all options equally (not such a desire to belong)
