Out-group Favoritism Of The Young Grassroots Toward The Second-generation Rich

Human society consists of various groups, and everyone belongs to certain groups. “In-group” refers to a group that people belong to, and out-group refers to those that people don’t belong to. Social identity theory holds that the in-group membership is significant for members as they often could maintain positive self-image through positive in-group image. Thus, people are inclined to have more positive attitudes toward their in-group than out-groups, which is called “in-group favoritism” and “out-group derogation”. But in recent years, some researchers surprisingly found that people sometimes display out-group favoritism rather than out-group derogation, especially among members of the disadvantaged groups. As for this phenomenon, social identity theorists hold that it is attributed to a low or none level of identification with the in-group, thus people unconsciously show preference to the advantaged out-groups. While system justification theory, from a different view, holds that people are often born with a motivation to protect the rules and systems of the society, with an inclination to accept what they receive. Out-group favoritism refers to maintain the unequal reality through social judgments and belief, which reflects a reality that members of the disadvantaged group have accepted and internalized the negative stereotypes from the public. Out-group favoritism has been testified in different group categories by foreign researchers, such as categories of gender, race and age. In these studies, researchers have found that women are more likely to choose men as their directors, the black are more inclined to choose the white as their partners, and the elders show more preference to the young. All these studies have been conducted among the groups whose boundary is impermeable and one’s membership couldn’t be changed. In such groups, out-group favoritism could be better explained by the system justification theory. As members of the disadvantaged groups have realized that their disadvantaged status couldn’t be improved through their efforts, they choose to accept what they get and the unequal statuses between their in-group and the advantaged out-groups in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance. However, for those disadvantaged members from groups whose boundary is open and the membership can be changed, would they still show out-group favoritism, which is the main point of this paper.In our study, we chose those undergraduate students as the participants who label themselves as the grassroots. The study consists of three experiments with different methods, aiming to investigate the participants’ implicit attitudes toward the second-generation rich and testify whether the grassroots display out-group favoritism toward the second-generation rich. The first experiment adopted the implicit association test, measuring the response time that the participants take to respond to different conditions in which category words and attribute words were combined. The results showed that when category words of the second-generation rich were combined with the negative attribute words and category words of the grassroots were combined with the positive words, the response was slower, which is compared to the combination of category words of second-generation rich with the positive words and the combination of category words of the grassroots with the negative words. In the further analysis of variance, the interaction between group and valence is significant. When category words of the second-generation rich was combined with the positive words, the response was faster than the combination between category words of the second-generation rich with the negative words. The results of the first experiment showed that the grassroots participants displayed out-group favoritism toward the second-generation rich. The second experiment adopted the paradigm of group-reference effect to testify the results of the first experiment. In the second experiment, participants were first asked to finish the attributes rating task about the two groups, then to recognize the words. It was found that the interaction between the group and valence is significant. When the target group was the second-generation rich, more positive words were recognized than the negative words. When the target group was the grassroots, the contrary results occurred, as more negative words were recognized. The result of the second experiment was consistent with that in the first experiment. Besides, it was found that there occurred in-group derogation among the grassroots. The third experiment adopted the typical paradigm of investigating the linguistic intergroup bias which could reflect the implicit attitudes toward the two groups by measuring the abstractness of language. Participants were asked to describe the cartoon pictures which included different valence behaviors of the two groups. The result showed that an interaction between group and valence is significant. When the behavior was the grassroots, participants used more abstract words to describe their positive behaviors and more concrete words to describe the negative behaviors. While the behavior was the second-generation rich, the results were contrary to that for the grassroots. The result of the third experiment turned out that participants showed in-group favoritism rather than out-group favoritism. It could be possibly explained that it was the instruction and the task that the membership of the participants was activated, thus they were reminded of the image and interest of the in-group so as to improve the motivation to maintain the in-group.This study manifested: out-group favoritism is a universal phenomenon that exists not only in the impermeable groups but also in the open groups. In the normal group context, the grassroots show an implicit preference for the second-generation rich and in-group derogation at the same time. But in a context with threat, that is, the in-group is situated with the out-group in a competitive context, the grassroots won’t show out-group favoritism toward the second-generation rich, in the contrast, they will turn back to their in-group and show in-group favoritism.