Mates Make Groups for Individualists But Not for Collectivists

Humans are an incredibly groupy type of animal. We form psychologically-meaningful groups based on our gender, age, nationality, religion, politics, skin colour, occupation, sexual inclination, and sports teams, to name just a few. Even in the artificial environment of psychology labs, people will identify with groups based on their totally random allocation to “Group A.” Indeed, they will declare that they feel “more similar” to Group A members than to Group B members, and even discriminate in favour of Group A members and against Group B members! But does everyone around the world identify with groups in the same way?

To investigate this issue, my colleagues and I conducted two studies in which we compared individualists (people from Western countries such as Australia and the USA) with collectivists (people from non-Western countries such as China and India). We measured people’s interpersonal closeness with other group members (in-group ties) and the degree to which they felt similar to other group members (perceived self-to-group similarity; a key indicator of social identification). In both studies, we found that interpersonal closeness was a significant positive predictor of perceived self-to-group similarity. In other words, the closer people felt to other people in their groups, the more similar they felt to them. Critically, however, this positive relation only held for individualists. There was no significant relationship between perceived interpersonal closeness and self-to-group similarity among the collectivists in our samples.

This suggests that interpersonal closeness is a stronger predictor of social identification among people from individualist cultures than among people from collectivist cultures. This is an important finding because social identification predicts prejudice and stereotyping, and so a better understanding of cross-cultural differences in the basis for social identification may help to improve the effectiveness of social interventions that reduce prejudice and stereotyping. For example, interventions based on interpersonal closeness may be more effective among people from individualist Western countries like the USA than among people from collectivist non-Western countries like China.

Our research helps to explain the basis for social identification among individualists. But it does leave an important question unanswered: On what basis do collectivists form their social identities? If interpersonal ties with other group members are not crucial, then what is? We believe that group harmony and sense of duty may represent two potential answers to this question.

For further information about this research, please see the following journal article:

Rubin, M., Milanov, M., & Paolini, S. (2016). Uncovering the diverse cultural bases of social identity: Ingroup ties predict self-stereotyping among individualists but not among collectivists Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 19 (3), 225-234 DOI: 10.1111/ajsp.12137   Self-Archived Version

For a You Tube video explaining the research, please click here.

High Status Groups are the Most Prototypical

Imagine an average, typical person walking down the street. Imagine them speaking on their mobile phone as they walk and waving to a friend who rides past on a bike.

Well done! Good imagining!! Now, what is the gender of your imaginary person? Were you thinking of a man or a woman? My guess is that it is a man rather than a woman! Why? Well, there is some evidence that people tend to perceive men as having a higher status than women and, in a recent research study, I found that people tend to perceive high status groups as being more typical of their overarching categories (in this case “people”) than low status groups.

In my study, I asked 139 undergraduates students to consider six novel, lab-based social groups that were named using colours: Yellow, Blue, Red, White, Orange, and Green. Students were told that the Yellow and Blue groups had a high social status, the Red and White groups had an average status, and the Orange and Green groups had a low status. The students then rated which of the groups they thought were the most typical (“representative” and “good examples”) of the six groups. Participants rated the two high status groups to be significantly more typical than the two low status groups. I believe that this difference occurred because participants placed a positive value on the overarching category of “research study groups”, and they perceived the Yellow and Blue groups to be the most representative of this category because these high status groups possessed the most positive features. In general then, I’m suggesting that the more positive a social group is perceived to be, the more representative it is perceived to be of positively-valued superordinate categories.

So, when asked to think about a typical person, you might think of a man rather than a woman because men tend to be perceived as having a higher status than women and, consequently, they are perceived to be more typical than women of the positively-valued superordinate category of “people”.

For more information about this research study, please see: Rubin, M. (2012). Group Status is Related to Group Prototypicality in the Absence of Social Identity Concerns The Journal of Social Psychology, 152 (3), 386-389 DOI: 10.1080/00224545.2011.614648

Positive and Negative Experiences with Members of Other Groups

When people have positive experiences with members of another group, they tend to generalize these experiences from the group member to the group as a whole. This process of member-to-group generalization results in less prejudice against the group. Notably, however, researchers have tended to ignore what happens when people have negative experiences with group members.

In a recent article, my colleagues and I proposed that negative experiences have an opposite but stronger effect on people's attitudes towards groups. In other words, negative experiences with group members produce a negative attitude towards the group that is stronger than the positive attitude produced by positive experiences. We assumed that this disproportionate influence of negative intergroup contact occurs because negative experiences draw attention to other people's groups, and this increased group salience allows greater generalization of negative experiences from group members to their groups.

To test this assumption, we asked 52 research participants to meet with a woman from Sri Lanka. Unbeknowst to our participants, we instructed the woman to behave in either a warm and relaxed manner (positive experience condition) or a distant and tense manner (negative experience condition). After the meeting, participants completed a questionnaire in which they described the woman. Participants in the negative experience condition were significantly more likely to mention the woman’s ethnicity compared to participants in the positive experience condition. Hence, consistent with our predictions, negative contact experiences were more likely to make people think about the other person’s group.

Our research findings are problematic for the goal of reducing prejudice because they indicate that negative experiences are more likely than positive experiences to generalize from group members to their groups. Hence, if an intergroup situation contains a mix of both positive and negative experiences, the negative experiences will have the most influence on attitudes about the group, leading to more prejudice, not less.

Our research leads to the worrying conclusion that intergroup contact may be naturally biased towards worsening intergroup relations rather than improving them. However, as we stress in our article, “our results are not a call and should not serve as a justification for intergroup segregation or isolationism”. Previous research has found that positive intergroup contact is a reliable and effective method for reducing prejudice (for a review, see Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). Hence, the real message of our work is that, when intergroup contact situations contain a mix of both positive and negative experiences, we need to strengthen the positive experiences in order to overcome the disproportionately powerful influence of the negative experiences and bring about an overall reduction in prejudice, discrimination, and intergroup conflict.

For further information, please see the following journal article: Paolini, S., Harwood, J., & Rubin, M. (2010). Negative Intergroup Contact Makes Group Memberships Salient: Explaining Why Intergroup Conflict Endures Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36 (12), 1723-1738 DOI: 10.1177/0146167210388667


This research was supported by the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme (Project DP0770704). However, the views expressed above are not necessarily those of the Australian Research Council.