When Ingroups Aren’t “In”: Perceived Political Belief Similarity Moderates Religious Ingroup Favoritism

Carlee Beth Hawkins,Brian A Nosek,Frank Krueger

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0050945

Abstract

Motivated thinking leads people to perceive similarity between the self and ingroups, but under some conditions, people may recognize that personal beliefs are misaligned with the beliefs of ingroups. In two focal experiments and two replications, we find evidence that perceived belief similarity moderates ingroup favoritism. As part of a charity donation task, participants donated money to a community charity or a religious charity. Compared to non-religious people, Christians favored religious charities, but within Christians, conservative Christians favored religious charities more than liberal Christians did. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the perceived political beliefs of the charity accounted for the differences in ingroup favoritism between liberal and conservative Christians. While reporting little awareness of the influence of ideology, Christian conservatives favored religious charities because they perceived them as conservative and liberal Christians favored the community charity because they perceived it as liberal.

Highlights

When many options are available, people tend to gravitate toward those associated with their identities
We argued that because religious groups are associated with a particular belief system, this cues belief similarity for conservative Christians, but dissimilarity for liberal Christians, resulting in decreased ingroup favoritism
To demonstrate that social political ideology was the key moderator, charity framing, social political ideology, economic political ideology, and their 2-way interaction terms were entered into a multiple regression as predictors of ingroup favoritism

Summary

Introduction

When many options are available, people tend to gravitate toward those associated with their identities. One might expect Billy Graham, but not Richard Dawkins, to contribute money to a religious charity. This is because they have different social identities – Graham is a ‘‘Christian’’ and Dawkins is an ‘‘atheist’’. In many cases, identifying with one’s social group leads to favoring the ‘‘ingroup’’ and its members, a robust phenomenon known as ingroup favoritism [1,2,3]. Religious group membership leads to ingroup favoritism. Hunter [6] experimentally manipulated the religious affiliation of a character in a series of vignettes to be either Christian or atheist. The Christian sample liked the person more if he was a member of their religious group

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion