Intergroup relations and the attribution of emotions: control over memory for secondary emotions associated with the ingroup and outgroup

This study tested the hypothesis that people perceive their ingroup as experiencing more uniquely human secondary emotions than the outgroup. Jacoby's process-dissociation procedure was used to measure participants' controlled recognition memory for materials that associated the ingroup or outgroup with secondary or primary emotions. Conscious memory was better for associations between the outgroup and secondary emotions than for associations between the ingroup and secondary emotions. No such difference was found for primary emotions. These results suggest that people attribute more humanity to the ingroup than to the outgroup.