Psychological Science ›› 2013, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (3): 702-705.

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Ingroup/Outgroup Favoritism among the Members of Low-Status Group By Using Process Dissociation Procedure

Yu-Fang ZHAO2   

  • Received:2011-11-04 Revised:2012-03-25 Online:2013-05-20 Published:2013-05-24
  • Contact: Yu-Fang ZHAO

使用加工分离程序对低地位群体内\外群体偏爱的研究

向玲,赵玉芳   

  1. 西南大学
  • 通讯作者: 赵玉芳

Abstract: Categorizing people into groups often leads to intergroup bias. Social identity theorists argue that in-group provides psychological benefits include acceptance, belonging, and social support, as well as a system of roles, rules, norms, values to group members, Because of the needs they fill, groups are as dear to people as life itself, and people fear their destruction almost as much as they fear their own. As a result, people tend to favor their own group and exhibit hostility toward other groups, which also called “in-group favoritism” and “out-group derogation,” respectively. But there is also an increasing body of evidence indicating people, typically low-status group members sometimes display out-group favoritism, which refers to the tendency to express an evaluative preference for members of a group to which one does not belong. Whereas the issue whether low-status groups had internalized the out-group favoritism was argued. Jost and Burgess proposed that out-group favoritism among groups low in social standing was due to complied with authority and self-protection, rather than internalized it. Mellott and Greenwald employed Implicit Association Test (IAT) and found low-status members displayed implicit out-group favoritism in facet of the cognition, emotion and behavior. Chinese researcher used the same method also found the similar finding. It illustrated that members in low-status groups indeed internalized the favoritism of high-status groups. But we noted that the used method typically was IAT, Jacoby suggested this implicit way may not be “process pure” and is likely to involve both conscious and unconscious processes. That is, the results may be a mixture but not pure implicit cognition. In order to gain further understanding regarding low-status members’ “real” implicit cognition about the high-status out-groups, it is important to dissociate these two cognitive processes and identify their respective contribution. To explore this issue, the current study adopted the process dissociation procedure. Besides, it is interesting to explore when low-status members has implicit out-group favoritism, how they evaluate their own group? Thus, process dissociation procedure was adopted to compute the separate contribution of conscious and unconscious processes when fifty rural undergraduates recognized trait words about urban group and rural group, and got the rural participants’ implicit cognition of these two groups. The results showed: when rural undergraduates recognized the trait words about urban group, the contribution of unconscious processes for positive words was significantly greater than for negative words. Whereas the differences in contribution of unconscious processes between the rural group’s positive words and negative words were not significant. It indicated that low status group members only have implicit out-group favoritism, but don’t have in-group favoritism.

Key words: Out-group favoritism, In-group favoritism, Process dissociation procedure

摘要: 使用加工分离程序(PDP),以50名农村籍大学生为被试, 采用2(群体:外群体、内群体)×2(特质词效价:积极、消极)×2(加工:意识加工、无意识加工)混合设计,研究了低地位群体对内群体以及高地位外群体偏爱的内隐特征。在本研究情境中发现:农村大学生在提取城市群体积极特质词比消极特质词时的无意识加工更显著;而提取农村群体的积极和消极特质词时,无意识加工的贡献没有显著差异。说明低地位群体成员对外群体有内隐偏爱,对内群体却不存在内隐偏爱。

关键词: 外群体偏爱, 内群体偏爱, 加工分离程序