An altruistic rationalization explanation of the interindividual–intergroup discontinuity effect proposes that intergroup interactions are more competitive than interactions between individuals because group membership creates an opportunity to rationalize selfishly motivated competitiveness as being enacted for the ingroup's sake. To test this explanation, we compared participants whose decisions did not influence the earnings of other participants, and who therefore had no opportunity for altruistic rationalization of competitiveness, with participants whose decisions did influence the earnings of other participants, and who therefore did have an opportunity for altruistic rationalization. Competition in a prisoner's dilemma game was greater when opportunities for altruistic rationalization were present, but this effect was significant only for participants who were low in dispositional proneness to guilt, a trait that motivates prosocial behavior. In other words, we found that dispositionally selfish individuals were most likely to become more competitive when opportunities for altruistic rationalization were present. These findings provide evidence for an additional mechanism driving the discontinuity effect.
For 40 years researchers have studied minimal groups using a variety of induction procedures which, surprisingly, have never been formally evaluated. This article reports two experiments that compared minimal group induction procedures based on: (1) memorization of novel ingroup names; (2) an imagination instruction; (3) random assignment; and (4) false feedback from painting preferences. The memorization procedure produced the largest ingroup favoritism effects on implicit measures of attraction and identification, whereas all procedures produced comparable ingroup favoritism effects on explicit measures of attraction and identification and bonus money allocation. The memorization procedure is recommended as a practical and effective minimal group induction procedure, particularly in cases in which implicit assessments are of primary interest.
Briefly studying names of four members of a hypothetical group produces identification with and attraction to that group, a finding labeled implicit partisanship (IP; Greenwald, Pickrell, & Farnham, 2002). The original demonstration of IP used human groups in a competitive context. Experiments I and 2 varied these procedures by using, respectively, a cooperative intergroup context and non-human group members (fictitious car brands). Neither of these variations eliminated the IP effect, indicating unanticipated robustness. Experiment 3 revealed a substantial reduction of the IP effect's magnitude when the studied names represented a rival university. The reduction of IP through identity opposition supports the interpretation that spontaneous group identification effects carry psychological significance that is comparable to that of more ordinary group identifications.
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We conducted preregistered replications of 28 classic and contemporary published findings, with protocols that were peer reviewed in advance, to examine variation in effect magnitudes across samples and settings. Each protocol was administered to approximately half of 125 samples that comprised 15,305 participants from 36 countries and territories. Using the conventional criterion of statistical significance (p < .05), we found that 15 (54%) of the replications provided evidence of a statistically significant effect in the same direction as the original finding. With a strict significance criterion (p < .0001), 14 (50%) of the replications still provided such evidence, a reflection of the extremely high-powered design. Seven (25%) of the replications yielded effect sizes larger than the original ones, and 21 (75%) yielded effect sizes smaller than the original ones. The median comparable Cohen's ds were 0.60 for the original findings and 0.15 for the replications. The effect sizes were small (< 0.20) in 16 of the replications (57%), and 9 effects (32%) were in the direction opposite the direction of the original effect. Across settings, the Q statistic indicated significant heterogeneity in 11 (39%) of the replication effects, and most of those were among the findings with the largest overall effect sizes; only 1 effect that was near zero in the aggregate showed significant heterogeneity according to this measure. Only 1 effect had a tau value greater than .20, an indication of moderate heterogeneity. Eight others had tau values near or slightly above .10, an indication of slight heterogeneity. Moderation tests indicated that very little heterogeneity was attributable to the order in which the tasks were performed or whether the tasks were administered in lab versus online. Exploratory comparisons revealed little heterogeneity between Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) cultures and less WEIRD cultures (i.e., cultures with relatively high and low WEIRDness scores, respectively). Cumulatively, variability in the observed effect sizes was attributable more to the effect being studied than to the sample or setting in which it was studied.