Dot estimation, Klee and Kandinsky and ingroup bias: social psychology's answers to prejudice
Prejudice and social cognition
Hey all,
Welcome to Human Nature, the illustrated psychology newsletter.
Thanks for your patience during the week-long hiatus in posting. I’m normally pretty good at sticking to the fortnightly schedule, but the last few weeks I’ve just been too busy with project deadlines. I’m happy to be back now to bring you new psychology articles every other Tuesday—thanks for sticking around!
In the last two articles, we explored cognitive psychology’s explanations for prejudice. The motivation behind using cognitive methods was to overcome the limitations of relying on people’s self-reports, which could be affected by social desirability concerns. Implicit measures were thought to provide a more honest picture of people’s levels of prejudice and better explain the mechanisms behind it. However, these methods aren’t without their own limitations.
For example, it has since been shown that implicit measures aren’t good predictors of explicit intergroup behaviour (Amodio, 2008). It has also been found that implicit stereotyping is not related to implicit prejudice, weakening the claim that prejudice results from cognitive biases and stereotypes (Amodio & Devine, 2006).
Therefore, we will now turn to social psychology to study prejudice at the level it occurs: between groups. We’ll start the topic with ingroup bias.
Ingroup bias
What it is: Ingroup bias refers to the tendency to favour members of our own group (the ingroup) over the outgroup. It can manifest as ingroup favouritism (treating the ingroup more positively) or outgroup derogation (treating the outgroup less positively).
Humans are social animals and we obtain many benefits from belonging to a group: security, social standing, feeling valued and respected, etc. Therefore, it is understandable that we would act in ways that favour members of our own ingroup, with the expectation that our actions will one day be reciprocated. However, this doesn’t explain why we sometimes act in ways that are derogate the outgroup. Two seminal social psychology studies have brought different perspectives to this phenomenon.
How it was discovered: The first of these studies was conducted by Muzafer Sherif, who aimed to explain prejudice at the intergroup level with realistic conflict theory. This theory posits that prejudice and discrimination stem directly from real world conflicts when two groups are competing over scarce resources.
In the now famous ‘boys camp’ study, Sherif and colleagues recruited young boys aged around 12 years old to take part in a summer camp. The boys were divided into two groups, and competed against each other in tasks that would only reward the winners (zero-sum conflict). As predicted, this quickly led to ingroup-outgroup divisions and conflict. However, because the group’s gains were directly related to individual gains, it is likely that the boys were largely motivated by self-interest. Therefore, these findings still failed to provide a true intergroup explanation for prejudice.
In order to overcome this issue, Tajfel and colleagues developed the minimal group paradigm. Their aim was to discover the minimal conditions necessary to create ingroup bias and intergroup discrimination. In their 1971 study, they recruited young boys aged 14-15 to take part in a series of experiments. The first half of the experiments was designed to create a false sense of group membership (referred to as mere social categorisation), while the second half aimed to measure how the boys treated their ingroups versus the outgroups.
In experiment 1, the boys were asked to estimate the number of dots that they saw on a screen. After doing this a number of times, they were randomly assigned to a group of either ‘under-estimators’ or ‘over-estimators’. In experiment 2, they were shown paintings by Klee and Kandinsky in pairs and asked to indicate their preference. Some of them were false pairs consisting of two paintings by the same painter. They were then randomly assigned to a group that supposedly reflected their preference.
In the second part of the experiments, the boys were given a resource allocation matrix (Figure A). The matrix presented different options of how to allocate resources between an anonymous ingroup member and an anonymous outgroup member. The options included one that maximised profits for the ingroup, one that maximised the difference between the profits of the ingroup and outgroup (which would hurt the outgroup but also the ingroup) and one where the resources were divided fairly.
It is worth noting that a non-negligible percentage of the participants opted for fairness (20% in experiment 1). But interestingly, in experiment 2, more participants chose to maximise the difference between ingroup and outgroup profits than to maximise profits for the ingroup. Both choices were in turn more popular than the option to divide resources fairly. This was the first experiment to show the presence of ingroup favouritism and outgroup derogation even in the absence of motivations of self-interest.
Why it happens: Later research suggested that Tajfel’s study did not completely rule out self-interest after all. Subsequent replications of the experiments found that participants did indeed have expectations of reciprocity when they displayed ingroup favouritism (e.g. Gaertner & Insko, 2000).
However, this still failed to explain why participants would opt for the maximum difference option, which also negatively affects the ingroup. This is clearly a more group-oriented strategy that focuses on weakening the outgroup. It was therefore necessary to find an explanation that goes beyond the level of individual self-interest to understand behaviours that occur at the intergroup level. It is out of this need that the concept of social identity was born, which we will explore in the next article.
Thank you for reading, see you next time.
Sources:
Social categorisation and intergroup behaviour. (Tajfel, Billig, Bundy & Flament, 1971).
The social neuroscience of intergroup relations (Amodio, 2008).
It seems as if no matter how much progress is made on the path towards equality and tolerance, prejudice and discrimination stubbornly persist all across the world. However, in order to combat prejudice, we must first understand how it works. In this series of Human Nature, we explore the mechanisms behind prejudiced thinking and behaviour through the lens of social psychology.