From implicit self-esteem to in-group favoritism.

摘要

People tend to favor in-groups over out-groups, no matter how minimally the in-group is defined. Psychologists argue that such in-group favoritism is caused by either low or high self-esteem. Proponents of Social Identity Theory (Abrams & Hogg, 1988) argue that people with low self-esteem should have more in-group favoritism than people with high self-esteem, because people with low self-esteem have the greatest need to feel better about themselves. In contrast, according to Balance Theory (Heider, 1958), people with high self-esteem should have more in-group favoritism, because people maintain consistent attitudes toward the self and toward their in-groups. Psychologists have yet to find an empirical resolution of these contradictory predictions, perhaps because of their reliance on self-report measures of self-esteem. Self-report measures have limited validity because they are biased by self-presentational concerns, and because they rely on people's ability to accurately introspect. The present research used an indirect measure, the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Farnham & Greenwald, 1998; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), to circumvent the limitations of self-report measures. As predicted by Balance Theory, Studies 1 and 2 show that people with high implicit self-esteem favor their sex and race more than people with low implicit self-esteem. Studies 3 and 4 shows that as soon as people are trained to identify with a group, they implicitly favor it, and Study 4 shows that people identify with a winning in-group and disidentify from a losing in-group, especially if they have high self-esteem. On self-report measures, studies 1–4 replicate past research, finding little or no relationship between self-esteem and in-group favoritism. In conclusion, people maintain balance among self-esteem, in-group identification, and in-group favoritism, as predicted by Balance Theory.