L23 Intergroup behaviour

• Levels if entitativity:

  1. Intimacy groups e.g. family, partners, friends
  2. Task groups e.g. colleagues, sport teams
  3. social categories e.g. sex, age
  4. loose associations e.g. Neighbours
• types of groups stangor (2016):

  1. Reference group - group we look up to and identify with because we want to be like those who belong to it
  2. Working group - group who is actively attempting to meet a specific group
  3. Social category - group we happen to share a social attribute with
• Need to belong theory = in order to survive humans have universal & innate need to form/ maintain stable relationships with others
• Social Identity Theory = humans derive their self-esteem and self-concept from belonging to social groups
• Self-categorization Theory = extension of SIT: individuals acquire hierarchy of identities based on belonging to different groups with ever-increasing levels of inclusion.
• Social Identity Theory Core ideas:

  1. Many social phenomena is impossible to understand if people are only studied in terms of their personal identities
  2. A meaningful social identity typically arises when a person knows that they belong to a certain group and begins to attach emotional significance to this group membership.
• Maximum positive distinctiveness:

  • People desire a positive self-concept that sets them apart from others.
  • A positive self-concept can be achieved by using one’s social identities in a self-enhancing manner
  • People try to make their in-groups positively distinct from out-groups through strategic social actions and comparisons
• Identifying with groups can influence:

  1. People’s individual behaviour
  2. People’s interpersonal behaviour
• The presence of group members can lead to:

  • social facilitation or social inhibition depending on
  • how skilled people are at what they are doing
  • How much people estimate that others pay attention to them
  • how worried people are that others will judge them
• social loafing = people make less effort when working in a group than when working alone
• Ingroup favouritism is when people feel and act more positively towards people in their group. This can happen even when groups are decided by nothing more than a coin flip.
• The minimal group paradigm - study

  • Participants divided into two groups based on random or semi-random criterion
  • They take part in an unrelated resource distribution task/ person evaluation task
  • Results: people consistently allocate more resources to members of their own group and judge their own group more positively