Outgroup Favoritism Of Disadvantaged Group In The Context Of Intergroup Threat

Human society is composed by lots of groups which are the premise of human’s survival and development. Ingroup refers to any group to which the individual has membership or belongs. Outgroup, conversely, is a group someone doesn’t belong to. Social identity theory proposes that people receive psychological and affective benefits from being a member of an ingroup, and individual’s self-concept derived from perceived membership of ingroup, group members identify their ingroup and strive to achieve or to maintain positive self-esteem by advantaged social comparison. Hence, people give preferential treatment to their own group and sometimes derogate other outgroups, this tendency also called "ingroup favoritism" and "outgroup derogation" separately. Especially when members of a group perceive that another group is ina position to cause them harm, outgroup derogation would be amplified. However, recent studies have found that people sometimes display outgroup favoritism rather than outgroup derogation, typically manifests itself in members of disadvantaged groups. Social identity theory can give a clearly explanation of ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation, while it fails to account for outgroup favotitism. So Jost and Banaji proposed system justification theory in1994. System justification theory holds that people are motivated tojustify and rationalize the way things are, so that existing social, economic arrangements tend to be perceived asfair and legitimate. Outgroup favoritism is an manifestation of how people have unconsciously absorbed existing inequalities, and the threats of social system may lead people to bolster existing arrangements. So when an outgroup poses a threat to ingroup’s interests, would the disadvantaged group members still bolster existing arrangements by favoring this outgroup? Furthmore, foreign researchers commonly focus on race, gender and age groups, few attention is given to the people whose group identity can bechanged, so whether can we get the consistent results when the participants are chose from groups which boundary are permeable? Two experiments were designed to study the above issues.In our study, we chose as participants undergraduate students who come from rural areas and adopted free recall and procedure dissociation procedure separately as method in the two experiments to study the explicit and implicit outgroup favoritism in the context of intergroup threat. The results was that:In experiment1, two-way interaction between valence and group was significant. Simple comparisons indicate that participants only in the control condition memorized more urban group positive words than negative words, while in the threat condition, recalled number of two kinds of trait words were no significant differences. In experiment2, the results yielded an interaction effect for valence and group. Simple comparisons indicate that participants who read the control article showed higher automatic memory estimates for urban group positive words than negative words. Participants in the threat condition, however, exhibited no significant difference in automatic memory estimates for urban group positive words and negative words.Through the above studies, the following conclusions were reached:(1)the universality of disadvantaged group’s outgroup favoritism. Disadvantaged group members displayed explicit and implicit outgroup favoritism when they didn’t perceive the intergroup threat from advantaged group.(2)Intergroup threat would influence outgroup favoritism. Disadvantaged group members didn’t show explicit and implicit outgroup favoritism any more when they perceived the intergroup threat from advantaged group.