Topic 23: Intergroup Behaviour

Question 1

What is a group?

Answer 1

Collection of two or more people who believe they have something in common

Question 2

What is an in-group?

Answer 2

A group of which a person is a member

Question 3

What is an out-group?

Answer 3

A group of which a person is not a member

Question 4

How are groups classified?

Answer 4

3 dimensions:
Size
Entitativity
Purpose

Question 5

What is entitativity?

Answer 5

Extent to which a group of individuals are perceived to be cohesive, interconnected, similar, interactive

Question 6

What are the levels of entitativity?

Answer 6

Levels of Entitativity (highest to lowest)

Intimacy Groups
(Family, Romantic Partners, Friends)

Task Groups
(Colleagues, Sport Teams)

Social Categories
(Sex, Age, Religion)

Loose Associations
(Neighbours, Strangers at bus stop)

Question 7

What is the need to belong theory?

Answer 7

(Baumeister & Leary 1995)

In order to survive humans have universal and innate need to form/maintain stable relationships with others

Question 8

What is the social identity theory?

Answer 8

(Tajfel 1978)
Humans derive their self-esteem and self-concept (incl. attitudes) from belonging to social groups

Question 9

What is the self categorisation theory?

Answer 9

(Turner et al. 1987)
Individuals acquire hierarchy of identities based on belonging to different groups with ever-increasing levels of inclusion - e.g. I’m Indian, Asian, Human

Question 10

What are the psychological effects of group membership?

Answer 10

Identifying with groups or being in the presence of other group members can influence:
- people’s individual behaviour
- people’s interpersonal behaviour (e.g. how they behave towards each other)

Question 11

What are the effects of group membership on individual behaviour?

Answer 11

The presence of other group members can lead to:
Social Facilitation and Social Inhibition and Social loafing

Question 12

What does social facilitation and inhibition depend on?

Answer 12

How skilled people are at what they are doing
How much people (over)estimate that others pay attention to them
How worried people are that others will judge them

Question 13

What is social facilitation?

Answer 13

An improvement in one’s individual performance in the company of others

Question 14

What is social inhibition?

Answer 14

A decrease/impairment in one’s individual performance

Question 15

What is social loafing?

Answer 15

People seem to expend less effort when working in a group than when working alone
But social loafers do not intentionally exploit the presence of others, instead it seems to happen outside of people’s awareness
Makes them different from free riders
Initial evidence that social loafing occurs less in women than men and in strong rather than weak entitativity groups

Question 16

What are the effects of group membership on interpersonal behaviour?

Answer 16

Involves ingroup favouritism and outgroup derogation

Question 17

What is intergroup behaviour?

Answer 17

Intergroup behaviour loosely refers to any perception, cognition, affect or behaviour that is influenced by people’s recognition that they and others are members of distinct social groups

Question 18

What is ingroup favouristism?

Answer 18

Upon joining a group, people usually feel and act more positively towards others who belong to the same group than themselves
Ingroup favouritism tends to arise even when group membership is determined by nothing more meaningful than a coin flip

Question 19

What is outgroup derogation?

Answer 19

more negative feelings and actions towards outgroup members

Question 20

What is The minimal Group Paradigm?

Answer 20

Developed to demonstrate the minimal conditions under which people begin to distinguish between ingroup members and outgroup members.
Participants (who do not know each other) come to the lab and get divided into two groups: A vs B based on a random coin flip or semi-random criterion e.g. art preferences
They then take part in an ostensibly unrelated resource distribution task and/or person evaluation task
Major finding: people consistently allocate more resources to members of their own group (even if they will personally not benefit from these resources) and judge their own group and other members of their own group more positively

Question 21

What is group culture?

Answer 21

An instance of group memory that lays out ideas about the world and ways to act in it that are considered appropriate by the group

Question 22

What do host cultures often expect of people arriving into their culture?

Answer 22

Host cultures often expect the people arriving into their culture for them to assimilate. BUT, there is evidence that it is less stressful for them to adopt integration rather than assimilation.

Question 23

What does WEIRD stand for?

Answer 23

Most psychological studies (95% of data) use data from individuals that live in Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic societies (WEIRD)

Question 24

What do we consider when carrying out cross-cultural research?

Answer 24

Approach A: compare people from different cultures by asking them things e.g. about their work or family values e.g. polling
Approach B: compare people from different cultures on their responses to various psychological tasks e.g. on the framed-line test

Question 25

What are common criticisms of Contemporary cross-cultural psychology?

Answer 25

Oversimplification
Lack of contextualisation
Ethnocentrism

Question 26

What is oversimplification?

Answer 26

Often compares cultures on relatively arbitrary and few dimensions at one specific point in time
Bears risk of promoting an impoverished understanding of cultures as ‘crystalised entities’
Overlooks heterogeneity: aggregation of data frequently hides large within-culture variance
Overlooks cultural change over time: lack of longitudinal investigations
Can promote false essentialism: unwarranted assumption that group contains features that are typical for all its members

Question 27

What is lack of contextualisation?

Answer 27

Observed commonalities and/or differences are rarely adequately contextualised: remains unclear why we observe them/what they mean
Historic and geopolitical events that may have produced them remain generally unstudied by psychologists
But these events matter for accurately interpreting the obtained data
E.g. imperialism/colonisation can elicit cultural similarities and opposition to imperialism can produce cultural differences

Question 28

What is ethnocentrism?

Answer 28

Cross-cultural work is often initiated by ‘White Westerners’ who bring their own preconceived notions and biases to this work
Problem of ethnocentrism: tendency to interpret or evaluate other cultures in terms of one’s own: can also affect researchers’ academic endeavors
Example: tendency to construct the “East” as fundamentally different (i.e. alien at best, inferior at worst) to the “West”