Abstract
Cognitive biases shape our perception of the world and our interactions with other people. Information related to the self and our social ingroups is prioritised for cognitive processing and can therefore form some of these key biases. However, ingroup biases may be elicited not only for established social groups, but also for minimal groups assigned by novel or random social categorisation. Moreover, whether these ‘ingroup biases’ are related to self-processing is unknown. Across three experiments, we utilised a social associative matching paradigm to examine whether the cognitive mechanisms underpinning the effects of minimal groups overlapped with those that prioritise the self, and whether minimal group allocation causes early processing advantages. We found significant advantages in response time and sensitivity (dprime) for stimuli associated with newly-assigned ingroups. Further, self-biases and ingroup-biases were positively correlated across individuals (Experiments 1 and 3). However, when the task was such that ingroup and self associations competed, only the self-advantage was detected (Experiment 2). These results demonstrate that even random group allocation quickly captures attention and enhances processing. Positive correlations between the self- and ingroup-biases suggest a common cognitive mechanism across individuals. These findings have implications for understanding how social biases filter our perception of the world.
Highlights
Sensitivity scores for self shapes compared to those of friend and stranger, and for friend compared to stranger shapes
Whilst we tend to envision group membership as referring to static collectives imbued with historic meaning such as religions, nationalities and ethnicities, the human drive for social classification is so great that ingroup favouritism is elicited even under ‘minimal group’ conditions, whereby individuals are assigned to novel groups randomly or on the ostensible basis of arbitrary information[31,32,33,34,35]
We examined the effects of minimal group allocation on low-level biases in associative matching
Summary
Sensitivity scores for self shapes compared to those of friend and stranger, and for friend compared to stranger shapes. In Experiment 1, all participants (within-subjects design) performed two separate matching tasks, one in which they learned to associate self and stranger labels with shapes (personal task), and the other in which they were allocated to novel teams and learned to associate ingroup and outgroup labels with different shapes (group task). Experiment 2 aimed to examine the relationship between the self- and ingroup-prioritisation effects when the self, stranger, ingroup and outgroup associations were made within the same task This allowed measurement of the relationship between the self- and ingroupadvantages when personal and group stimuli were salient in the same blocks of the same task, enabling us to test whether prioritisation for novel ingroups remains when the self is salient. We analysed our data by shape condition (as opposed to label) because our primary interest is in how social meaning can be quickly tagged to novel stimuli (i.e., the shapes), rather than in biases for already learned social content (i.e., social labels)
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