Attention Bias Of Low Socioeconomic Status Group In The Context Of Intergroup Threat

An intergroup threat is experienced when members of a group perceive that another group is in a position to cause them harm. The concern about physical harm or a loss of resources is supposed as realistic threat, and the concern about the integrity or validity of the ingroup’s meaning system is supposed as symbolic threat (Stephan, Ybarra,& Morrison,2009). Based on the intergroup threat literature and relevant theories, intergroup threat was classified into three categories, realistic threat, social identity threat and cultural threat. When the outgroup has a higher status in the society, they will pose social identity threat to the ingroup. Moral standards, norms and values of immigrants will pose cultural threat to the natives (Zhang, Feng,& Wang,2009). It is apparent that there are a number of cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes of intergroup threat.The more important is that there are both orienting and maintenance components of attention bias during the processing of threat information in the context of intergroup threat. However, scholars’attention is drawn by people of different race or gender, few attention is given to the people whose group identity can be changed, such as the people of different socioeconomic status groups.The higher SES group own more resources and power, which will pose realistic threat and social identity threat to the lower SES group. Would the people of low SES group pose attention bias in the context of intergroup threat? Two experiments were designed to study the above issues.In our study, the dual criteria for the classification includes objective and subjective indexs, Specifically, we choose the students whose family economic status is lower in the society as our participants, meanwhile, they should identify with their economic status. We designed two experiments to study the attention bias in the context of intergroup threat. In the two experiments, participants should complete a "cue-target" task under the context of the high SES group’s realistic threat and social identity which is caused by reading an anticle.The results was that:In Experiment 1, the feeling of anger is different between the group under the condition of realistic threat and the control group. There is no difference among the other emotional response of the two group. Besides, the results reveal a two-way interaction between the type of the words and the cue. A deeper analyse showed that when the cue was valid, the main effect of the type of the words was not significant. Besides, the main effect of the type of the words was significant. When the cue was unvalid, paritcipants would spend more time on the positive words compared with the negative words and the neutral words. There was no difference on the reaction time between the negative words and the neutral words. In Experiment 2, participants under the condition of social identity threat has showed more anger worry, fear, indignation and anxiety than the participants of the control group. Besides, the results reveal a two-way interaction between the cuethe and the group. When the cue was valid, the main effect of group was not significant and there was no difference on the reaction time between the two groups. Besides, when the cue was unvalid, the main effect of group was significant and the reaction time of the group under the social identity threat was less than the control group.From the results, we conclude that people of low SES group reflect an attention bias to the high SES group’s positive feature, they show more attention maintenance towards the positive feature of high SES. In the context of the the high SES group’s social identity threat, people of low SES would show less attention maintenance and disengage more quickly from all kinds of the information.