Tajfel Flashcards
1
Q
What can the study be used for?
A
Social identity theory
2
Q
Year
A
1971
3
Q
Background
A
- As social animals, humans have an innate need to belong
- Social identity theory is a theory that focuses on intergroup relationships
- Minimal group paradigm
- Social categorization
- Social identification
- Social comparison, in group favourism, out group discrimination
4
Q
Aim
A
Investigate effects of social categorisation on intergroup behaviour in a minimal group paradigm
5
Q
Participants
A
64 British school boys 14-16 years old
6
Q
Experimental design
A
Experiment
7
Q
Procedure
A
- In stage 1, boys were were shown 40 slides and asked to estimate the number of dots that they had seen.
- They were then told that researchers are also interested in different kind of judgement and that they’d be sorted into groups based on overestimating or underestimating the dot number
- Boys were taken to separate cubicles and required to attribute rewards (trivial amount of money) to either members of the same group or outgroups
- In a followup experiment, the matrices had been slightly changed in such a way that reward choices would either award maximum number of points to both groups, only the ingroup, or maximise the difference between groups
8
Q
Results
A
- Research found that boys were more likely to favour ingroups when choosing between awards in the first experiment
- In the second experiment, they were willing to sacrifice personal gain to achieve favourable intergroup differences
9
Q
Link to SIT
A
- Boys engaged in social categorisation
- Showed in group favourism and out-group discrimination
- Social comparison (they make choices such that would make their group different in a positive way - positive distinctiveness)
10
Q
Evaluation
A
+ High control of confounding variables
+ Strong empirical support for SIT
- Ecological validity low
- Sample bias (only boys used in the study)
