Empirical Research On Social Identity And Ingroup Favoritism Model

Social identity theory is a very important in exploiting the behaviors between groups. It has become the core of European social psychology, playing an important role in cultural exchange, religion, organizational behavior, nation and ethnic groups. Social identity theory holds that people can distinguish in-group and out-group members consciously and maintaining a positive social motivation and obtain a positive self-conception. If one person belongs to a group, he or she will make a better evaluation toward this group and provide more resources. This categorization of "we" vs. "they" on cognitive would make him or her subjectively gain a sense of social belongs of its group. This phenomenon that people offer the group of "we" more resources and better evaluation is called "in-group favoritism".The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between identification and in-group favoritism. This link firstly derived from social identity theory (Tajfel, 1981), which, however, only approached the issue from the context of clear inter-groups (Turner, 1999). Two researches are conducted in this paper to discover the relationship between social identification and in-group favoritism, combined with the influence of three factors on the linkage intensity. The first is "in-group threat". In particular, two types of threat are considered: a threat to in-group value (Studies 1 and 2) and a threat to in-group distinctiveness (Study 2). These conditions are compared with situations in which the in-group is not threatened: in Study 1, the non-threat description is a positive evaluation of out-group on in-group, in Study 2; non-threat description is presented not from any out-group. The second factor involved in the relationship between identification and in-group bias is the mediating role of trust between in-group and out-group members. Finally, the paper also takes into account the degree of association between in-group and out-group evaluations.The research finds that the linkage between social identification and in-group is relatively weak when the group is not being threatened, but it will become stronger when threat comes. This phenomenon shows that the link between social identification and in-group favoritism is not constantly reliable, but only become stronger and clearer when threat is introduced. When threat is not available, the link between social identification and in-group favoritism is weak with the high trust toward in-group. When threat is available, the social identification of group is influenced by out-group evaluation and the difference between groups. These results demonstrate that: (1) the link between social identification and in-group favoritism relies on the judgment of group members on surroundings between groups, and the link is reliable only when the surroundings are distinct, which proves the uncertain relationship between social identification and in-group favoritism; (2) the variables of value threat and distinctiveness threat to group change the trust between in-group and out-group; (3) the evaluation on in-group and out-group alters with the threat from outside, and the in-group favoritism and out-group disparagement is not a none or all matter, and they may occur when in-group value is threatened by out-group.