Abstract
Social identity theory shows that individuals’ social identity can become salient in some contexts and affect their cognition and behavior. Little research has focused on the impact of ethnic identity salience on the group-reference effect in the remembering-knowing recognition task. Thus, the current study aims to examine this effect of ethnic identity salience. In Experiment 1 we recruited 26 Tibetan students and 30 Han Chinese students from a predominantly Han Chinese university. In Experiment 2, we selected 26 Tibetan students and 30 Han Chinese students from a predominantly Tibetan university. Two weeks before the experiment, all participants reported the baseline level of their social identity salience. After two weeks, each participant underwent a memory test. Tibetan students at the predominantly Han Chinese university showed evidence of higher ethnic identity salience and superior recognition memory performance during a Tibetan reference encoding task than during a Han Chinese reference encoding task (Experiment 1). However, Tibetan students at the Tibetan-majority university did not show this effect (Experiment 2). In comparison, Han Chinese participants did not show any social identity salience in the two experiments. The results show that the salient social identity had an effect on the group reference effect in a remembering-recognition memory test. The current study contributes to the past literature by providing a tentative further understanding of the relationship between social identity salience and remembering judgments.
Highlights
Social identity theory shows that individuals’ social identity can become salient in some contexts and affect their cognition and behavior
The results found that the ethnic identity of Tibetan was only salient among those Tibetan students in the Han Chinesedominant university
Since Tibetan students made the remembering judgments in relation to their own recollective experiences, Tibetan students’ group reference effect can be detected under the remembering judgment condition, which is supported by the previous study (Conway & Dewhurst, 1995)
Summary
Social identity theory shows that individuals’ social identity can become salient in some contexts and affect their cognition and behavior. Little research has focused on the impact of ethnic identity salience on the group-reference effect in the remembering-knowing recognition task. Tibetan students at the predominantly Han Chinese university showed evidence of higher ethnic identity salience and superior recognition memory performance during a Tibetan reference encoding task than during a Han Chinese reference encoding task (Experiment 1). The results show that the salient social identity had an effect on the group reference effect in a remembering-recognition memory test. Johnson et al (2002) confirmed that organization and elaboration might be two possible mechanisms underlying the facilitating effect of social identity salience on group-reference memory. We propose that an individual’s ethnic identity is salient and will facilitate memory performance in a remembering judgments task related to one’s own recollective experiences. Identity becomes more salient when social conditions highlight the relevance or discernibility of an ethnic minority group
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