Self-evaluation Of Disadvantaged Group In The Context Of Intergroup Threat

Human beings living in a multi-dimensional environment, multi-ethnic, multi-ethnic, multi-country, multi-gender, multi-social class, which classified by different standards. People defines those who have the common sense of belonging and the same uniformity as in-group, conversely, the rest are the out-group. Belonging to a certain group brings psychological benefits to the individual, and people use social comparisons with others to make sense of their own outcomes. Intergroup threat then occurs when in-group’s existence, development and goal are challenged by out-group during the intergroup competence. Perceived threats have real consequences, regardless of whether or not the perceptions of threat are accurate. Intergroup threat can increase the cognitive bias and negative behaviors, even lead to intergroup conflict and violence. As a result, people tend to favor their own group and exhibit hostility towards other group, especially during dangerous or contentious times. To some degree, members of disadvantaged groups internalize negative stereotypes and evaluations of their own group, which exhibiting less favorable affective reactions towards their groups and are less likely to choose to interact with members of their own groups, relative to higher status group members. Quantity of researchers questioned whether explanations of social-comparative judgments have focus too heavily on self-enhancement motivation as an underlying factor. The out-group contrast model and spillover model of group evaluation would predict a positive relation between self- and in-group evaluation. The different status would have effect on self-evaluation. Socio-economic status as the main classification, which have strong boundary permeability, have the motivation to be a high SES member. So what would the lower SES members reaction under the intergroup threat? In this study, we design three studies to investigate the self-evaluation of low disadvantaged group with the key point of intergroup threat.In our study, we choose students in SWU as participants who come from low economic status, Use the establishment materials as the manipulation of threat. Our major goals are to investigate the implicit and explicit self-evaluation under intergroup threat. In experiment 1,the results shows that when people perceive the threat from the high economic status, compare with the control group, they still put up equivalent energy and preparation to the competition, but their expectation of outcome is significant lower than the control, at the same time, their scores on the Core Self-Evaluation Scale(CSES) have a significant difference with the control. In experiment 2, the explicit self-evaluation is conversely, the participants under threat show higher satisfaction and self-evaluation than the control. In experiment 3, participants in the threat condition,however, exhibit significant difference in the judgment of positive words.Through the above experiments, we can draw the conclusions that intergroup threat would influence self-evaluation, people’s self-evaluation show positive tendency by the explicit measurement, and negative tendency by the implicit measurement. The achievement motivation of the lower SES members is inspired by intergroup threat, and they have positive self-evaluation which was used explicit measurement.