The group as a resource: reducing biased attributions for group success and failure via group affirmation

Self-affirmation theory proposes that people can respond to threats to the self by affirming alternative sources of self-integrity, resulting in greater openness to self-threatening information. The present research examines this at a group level by investigating whether a group affirmation (affirming an important group value) increases acceptance of threatening group information among sports teams and fans. In Study 1, athletes exhibited a group-serving attributional bias, which was eliminated by the group affirmation. In Study 2, the most highly identified fans exhibited the most bias in terms of their attributions, and this bias was eliminated by the group affirmation. These studies suggest that groups can serve as resources from which people can draw in response to threatening group events.     

Autocratic leadership in social dilemmas: A threat to group stability

This paper investigated the impact of leadership style on the stability of small social dilemma groups. In two experiments, group members were more likely to exit their group and take their resources elsewhere if they were supervised by an autocratic style leader than by a democratic or laissez-faire style leader. The destabilizing influence of autocratic leadership is due to the procedural rather than distributive aspects of this leadership style: More members exited their group under an autocratic style leader, relative to a democratic style leader, regardless of whether or not they received favorable personal outcomes from the leader. Hence, autocratic leadership is not a stable long-term solution to the problem of public goods in groups.     

Reactions to success and failure in public and in private conditions

It was shown that the reaction to success and failure differs when it is communicated publicly or privately and when the reaction to success and failure is measured publicly or privately. Participants took an intelligence test and received fictitious results which were positively or negatively discrepant from the average. The dependent variable was the evaluation of the intelligence test. It was found that when the subject's evaluation of the test was private, the test was evaluated more positively under public than under private success. However, it was evaluated more negatively under public than under private failure. Under public success feedback the test was evaluated more positively under private than under public evaluation, whereas under public failure feedback the effect was reversed. The results are interpreted in terms of a self-presentation model and were discussed in the context of earlier research within the field of interpersonal relations.     

The self-attribution of emotion as a function of success and failure1

When an act is interpreted as emotional, the responding individual generally is considered less responsible than if the act were interpreted as deliberate. This leads to the hypothesis that the self-attribution of emotion will more likely occur when behavior has undesirable rather than desirable consequences. Three experiments were conducted to explore this hypothesis. In these experiments, the self-attribution of emotion was assessed indirectly by having the subjects judge potentially arousing stimuli (e.g., nudes and corpses) after these stimuli had been associated with either failure or success on a problem-solving task. As predicted, the nudes were judged more attractive and the corpses more disturbing when they were associated with failure. This tendency was most apparent among subjects who perceived the task to be a valid indication of intellectual ability.     

Violating equality in social dilemmas: emotional and retributive reactions as a function of trust, attribution, and honesty

In social dilemmas, equality is an important coordination rule. When equality is violated, people seek explanations. In Experiment 1, the authors assessed dispositional trust and found that especially high trusters were affected by the given explanation. High trusters reacted less negatively to external than internal explanations. Experiment 2, using a manipulation of trust in others, revealed a similar pattern across a wider range of negative emotions. In Experiment 3, the authors only induced high trust and showed that when the external explanation turned out to be a lie, emotional and retributive reactions became more negative. Moreover, attribution information did not influence reactions when participants realized that the information was dishonest.     

Women''s yielding to social group pressure as a function of alcohol and type of pressure

Thirty-six women participated in an experiment exploring whether alcohol intoxication facilitates yielding to social persuasive information. Subjects were randomly assigned to either an Alcohol, a Placebo, or a Control Group. The alcohol dose was 1.0 ml of 100% alcohol/kg body weight. Subjects first estimated the length of a line and were then given faked feedback from either a male or a female peer reference group. This procedure was repeated 60 times. Analyses indicated that the Placebo group yielded more often than the Alcohol group irrespective of type of feedback. A measure of locus of control indicated no significant mean differences as a function of alcohol group but correlations between externality and yielding were strong for placebo subjects, that is, externally oriented placebo subjects yielded more than internally oriented placebo subjects. This was discussed in terms of feelings uneasiness caused by the discrepancy between feelings of intoxication and information about drink content.     

Causal attribution of success and failure as a function or authoritarianism and sex.

We predicted that authoritarian actors would engage in defensive attribution, and authoritarian observers would derogate the other, to a greater extent than egalitarian perceivers. 48 male and 48 female college students were run in pairs of same sex and authoritarianism. A set of easy anagrams was given to subjects in success conditions and difficult anagrams to those in failure conditions. Each subject rated own outcome and other outcome in terms of internal factors of ability and effort, and external factors of task and luck. We found that authoritarian actors were more internal than egalitarian actors only in the condition own success-other's failure. Authoritarian observers, as compared to egalitarians, were more external for other's success and more internal for other's failure only when own outcome was successful. It seems that authoritarian perceivers exaggerate their abilities and derogate the other only when they are clearly in a superior position vis-a-vis the other. There were no sex differences as a function of outcome and authoritarianism.     

Perceptions of group homogeneity as a function of social comparison: The mediating role of group identity

Recent research has shown that creating an intergroup context of comparison may influence the outgroup homogeneity effect or even turn it into an ingroup homogeneity effect. In the present study, the aim was to replicate these findings by using overall judgment of similarity instead of the more commonly used dimensional ratings. Further, and more importantly, it was argued that this effect could be explained by an increase in the salience of participants’ group identity. The results showed that context of comparison revealed an effect on both level of group identification and perceptions of relative ingroup and outgroup homogeneity. In line with predictions, participants’ level of group identification seemed to account for the effect of the comparison context on the homogeneity ratings.     

Perceptions of group homogeneity as a function of social comparison: The mediating role of group identity

Recent research has shown that creating an intergroup context of comparison may influence the outgroup homogeneity effect or even turn it into an ingroup homogeneity effect. In the present study, the aim was to replicate these findings by using overall judgment of similarity instead of the more commonly used dimensional ratings. Further, and more importantly, it was argued that this effect could be explained by an increase in the salience of participants’ group identity. The results showed that context of comparison revealed an effect on both level of group identification and perceptions of relative ingroup and outgroup homogeneity. In line with predictions, participants’ level of group identification seemed to account for the effect of the comparison context on the homogeneity ratings.     

Bullying as a group process: Participant roles and their relations to social status within the group

Bullying was investigated as a group process, a social phenomenon taking place in a school setting among 573 Finnish sixth-grade children (286 girls, 287 boys) aged 12–13 years. Different Participant Roles taken by individual children in the bullying process were examined and related to a) self-estimated behavior in bullying situations, b) social acceptance and social rejection, and c) belongingness to one of the five sociometric status groups (popular, rejected, neglected, controversial, and average). The Participant Roles assigned to the subject were Victim, Bully, Reinforcer of the bully, Assistant of the bully, Defender of the victim, and Outsider. There were significant sex differences in the distribution of Participant Roles. Boys were more frequently in the roles of Bully, Reinforcer and Assistant, while the most frequent roles of the girls were those of Defender and Outsider. The subjects were moderately well aware of their Participant Roles, although they underestimated their participation in active bullying behavior and emphasized that they acted as Defenders and Outsiders. The sociometric status of the children was found to be connected to their Participant Roles. © 1996 Wiley-Liss, Inc.     

Ethnic group identification and group evaluation among minority and majority groups: testing the multiculturalism hypothesis

Following social identity theory, the author hypothesized that members of minority groups are more likely than majority group members to endorse multiculturalism more strongly and assimilationist thinking less strongly. In addition, the multiculturalism hypothesis proposes that the more minority groups endorse the ideology of multiculturalism (or assimilationism), the more (or less) likely they will be to identify with their ethnic in-group and to show positive in-group evaluation. In contrast, the more majority group members endorse multiculturalism (or assimilationism), the less (or more) likely they are to identify with their ethnic group and to show negative out-group evaluation. Results from 4 studies (correlational and experimental) provide support for this hypothesis among Dutch and Turkish participants living in the Netherlands.     

Political identification and the defining issues test: reevaluating an old hypothesis

Research on the association between the development of moral judgment (as measured by the Defining Issues Test [DIT]; J. R. Rest, 1979) and political attitudes has demonstrated that these factors are often reliably related. N. Emler (1987, 1990) and colleagues have asserted that DIT scores actually measure test-takers' political identity rather than their developmental level. To test this claim, these researchers have designed "faking studies" in which respondents are asked to complete the DIT as if they were of a particular political orientation, regardless of their real political views. These faking studies have yielded contradictory conclusions, whereas tests of the incremental validity of the DIT have provided some evidence for its empirical distinctiveness. In the present study, the authors reexamined this issue by pitting scores on the DIT, Version 2 (DIT-2; J. R. Rest, D. Narvaez, S. J. Thoma, & M. J. Bebeau, 1999) against several more concrete measures of political identification in several predictive models of attitudes toward human rights and civil liberties. DIT-2 scores and political identification emerged as significant predictors in nearly all regression analyses.     

Motivation as a function of success frequency

Motivation and Emotion - It is well-established that intermediate challenge is optimally motivating. We tested whether this can be quantified into an inverted-U relationship between motivation and...     

Group performance as a function of group type,task condition and scholastic level

Studied performance on a multiple-solution anagrams task by two-member nominal, pseudo, quasi, and real groups in relation to task conditions (set versus nonset) and school grades (10th, 11th, and 12th). Nominal groups were made up of individuals working alone. Pseudo groups were made up of members sitting together but working independently for individual scores. Quasi groups were made up of members who were working together for a common or shared goal but were not allowed to communicate with each other. Real groups were the usual teams of freely interacting and mutually consulting members. Five words were presented to the subjects in the set condition (unlike in the nonset co ndition) in order to channelize their problem-solving activity in particular directions. The subjects were 192 male American high school students. The most important finding was that both nominal and pseudo groups produced more errors than real groups. Also the set condition generated more errors than the nonset condition. These and other findings were discussed and interpreted in the context of previous research.