‘Implicit justifications’ and self-serving group allocations

Abstract

In comparison to allocating resources to oneself, when allocating resources to one's group, people are able to ‘get away with’ taking more than a fair and equal share because there exists an implicit justification that fellow group members will benefit. Such an implicit justification enables people to hide their self-serving motivation. Results reveal that subjects allocating a sum of money between their group and a competing group took a significantly greater share of the resource than subjects allocating between themselves and a competing individual. Whether the allocation was made public or kept private had a significant impact on this relationship: the difference between group and self allocations was significantly greater when the allocation was made public than when kept private. However, subjects allocating only to themselves and in private were almost as self-serving as subjects allocating to their group (both in private and in public). The only case where subjects were overly constrained by equality was when they were allocating to only themselves and the allocation was made public. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.