The Influence Of Different Sources 'Self - Esteem Threats On The Group' S Preference

In-group favoritism refers to the systematic tendency to evaluate one’s own membership group more favorably than a non-membership group, and it can encompass behavior (discrimination), attitude (prejudice), and cognition (stereotype). According to the Social Identity Theory, successful in-group favoritism eatablishes or protects relatively high social status for in-group, thereby providing a positive social identity for in-group members and satisfying their need for positive self-esteem. The self-esteem hypothesis derived from the SIT suggests that depressed or threatened self-esteem promotes in-group favoritism because of a need of self-esteem, but has obtained little supportive evidence unfortunately. Many researchers assumed that the mismatch between the type of self-esteem that is typically measured in investigation of the self-esteem hypothesis and the type of self-esteem that should be measured according to social identity theory might be the main reason resulting in prior inconsistent findings. Present study conceptualized the self-esteem as the specific social state self-esteem and manipulated it through esteem-enhancing or esteem-reducing feedback.Aiming to explore the effect of threatened self-esteem on in-group favoritism, Study 1 and Study 2 employed a 2 (Type of feedback:negative vs control)×2 (Target group:in-group vs out-group) mixed-model design, with target group being the within-subject variable, and assessed the in-group favoritism explicitly (social evaluation and resource allocation) and implicitly (Implicit Association Test).Results showed that participants who received positive or no feedback evaluated their in-group more positively and allocated more resource to in-group than outgroup, but these effects didn’t exist among those who received negative feedback. In order to compare the effect of threatened self-esteem from different threat sources on in-group favoritism, each participant randomly received one of three kinds of feedback (negative feedback from outgroup, negative feedback from the third-party, no feedback) in Study 3. As shown by the result, criticism made by out-group members decreased participants’identification with in-group, while negative feedback from the authoritative third-party (i.e., the detection system of problem-solving ability) reduced not only participants’ social identity but also their belonging need for ingroup. In addition, only those who simultaneously highly identified with ingroup and held strong need to belong to the ingroup exhibited ingroup favoritism in the face-recognition task.Present study provided a new perspective to understand the relation between self-esteem and in-group favoritism and expanded the connotation of Social Identity Theory.