The Nature of Ethnocentric Attribution Bias: Ingroup Protection or Enhancement?

Abstract

Drawing on the self-attribution bias literature (Miller & Ross, 1975), ethnocentric attribution is reexamined in terms of two potentially distinct ingroup-serving biases: Attributing ingroup negative and outgroup positive behavior to external causes may function to protect or maintain group-esteem, whereas making internal causal attributions for ingroup positive and outgroup negative behavior may function to promote or enhance it (Hewstone, 1990). Two experiments examined the hypotheses that (1) protective attribution alone can account for ethnocentric attribution bias, and (2) enhancement bias occurs primarily in response to acute intergroup conflict. In Experiment 1, artificial groups, varying in level of intergroup contention, provided causal attributions for videotaped positive and negative intergroup behavior. Results showed that only protective attributions increased in response to low-level conflict, relative to non-conflict control groups, and accounted for the observed attribution bias. In Experiment 2, African and Korean American students were exposed to a conflict or neutral prime in an embedded survey manipulation of conflict. Consistent with Experiment 1, conflict increased protective attribution for positive behavior but did not influence enhancement attributions. Results are discussed in terms of differences between self- and group-serving causal attributions and the conditions potentially necessary to engage protective or enhancement biases.