The Influence Of Care Motivation And Attachment On External Group Bias

It's widely acknowledged that out-group prejudice poses threat to the stability of the society and the peace of the world,which spurs a good quantity of researches on it since the determination of the antecedents and the underlying mechanism of out-group prejudice has vital implications to the intervention and inter-group cooperation.Much attention has been drawn to the inter-group attitude in the field of attachment theory with consistent findings showing that attachment security helps to reduce out-group negative attitude,while the research on the role attachment security plays on implicit out-group prejudice is still scarce.In the meanwhile,western researchers paied attention to the boosting effect of caregiving motivation on out-group,and gathered preliminary supporting evidence.Taken the cultural difference between western and Chinese cultures,especially the deeply rooted Culture of Harmony in China,into consideration,it's necessary to replicate the work using the Chinese samples.In addition,it's self-evident that the inter-group interactions and our-group attitude is organized by both of the caregiving behavioral system and the attachment behavioral system,and hence the influence of them on out-group prejudice needs to be examined simultaneously,let alone the role of their interaction.This research aimed to examine the effects of caregiving motivation,attachment security,as well as the interaction of caregiving motivation and attachment security on out-group prejudice under the context of Chinese culture using one correlation cross-sectional study and four causal experiments.The Experiences in Close Relationships-Relationship Structures scale(ECR-RS,Fraley et al.,2011a),out-group emotions inventory(Saleem et al.,2015),Parental Care and Tenderness Questionnaire(PCAT,Buckels et al.,2015)and two items assessing the degree to which participants take care from and give care to their parents,were administered to 646 participants with the median age of 19(the range was 16-50).Hierarchical multiple regression and simple slope test were conducted to examine the moderation model in which the effect of trait caregiving motivation on explicit out-group prejudice depended on attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance moderate,with the results showed that the boosting effect of trait caregiving motivation on prejudice got strengthened as the level of attachment anxiety increase or the level of attachment avoidance decrease.Experiment 1 conducted a two-level one factor between-subjects design to test the effect of caregiving motivation on implicit out-group prejudice using a Chinese sample.The caregiving motivation was temporarily induced by arranging for experiment group(n=25)to watch 5 Chinese baby pictures(the control group[n=24]watched 5 outdoor scene pictures,of which the arousal and valence were matched with baby pictures).The evaluative priming paradigm(EPP,Wittenbrink et al.,2001)and the affect misattribution paradigm(AMP,Payne et al.,2005)were performed to measure the implicit out-group prejudice after caregiving motivation priming.Results of ANCOVA verified the boosting effect of caregiving motivation.Experiment 2(n=159)conducted a 2(attachment security priming vs.Attachment security control)*2(caregiving motivation priming vs.caregiving motivation control)between subjects design to examine the effects of state caregiving motivation,state attachment security and their interaction on implicit out-group prejudice.Follwing Sakaluk's(2013)advice,the guided recall task was adopted to manipulate the attachment security.Then,a guided imagine task was used to manipulate participants'state caregiving motivation.The between-subjects ANOVA,followed by the simple main effect analysis,was carried out to test the hypothesis.The results showed that induced caregiving motivation in such a way of experiment 4 under the context of Chinese culture reduced the implicit out-group prejudice,since the high-degree induced caregiving motivation may boost Chinese participants' superordinate group identity.That's,Chinese participants in such a state of high-degree caregiving motivation seemed to "take care of" out-group,which improve their positive attitude towards out-group.In deserves a mention that high-degree induced caregiving motivation in previous research increased out-group bias,which contradict this research.Experiment 3(n=55)also conducted a 2(attachment security priming vs.Attachment security control)*2(caregiving motivation priming vs.caregiving motivation control)between-subjects design to examine the effects of state caregiving motivation,state attachment security and their interaction on implicit out-group prejudice using a sequence of manipulations.The lexical words decision task was used to manipulate the attachment security,and the pictures were used to manipulate the caregiving motivation followed by the affect misattribution paradigm.Note that two blocks of pictures(high-and low-level baby face pictures)were presented,each followed by a block of AMP,with the order balanced across participants.Though experiment 3 failed to verify the hypothesized effects of attachment security,it demonstrated that high-degree caregiving motivation reduced participants' implicit out-group prejudice compared with the low-degree caregving motivation,which provided evidence for the inference drawn from the experiment 2 that high-degree caregiving motivation can decrease out-group prejudice.In a word,this research verified that caregiving motivation can increase or decrease out-group prejudice,and regulatory focus may help to explain the difference.Furthermore,the strength of caregiving motivation's effect depended on the level of attachment security and security.Specifically,the effect of caregiving motivation on out-group prejudice was weaker when the level of trait attachment security(low on attachment anxiety)and trait security(high on attachment avoidance)was high,or when the state attachment security was induced.Finding above suggests the protective role of attachment security and security,and providing supportive evidence for the terror management theory,inclusive fitness theory and attachment theory.Also,this research underlines the role of regulatory focus in clarifying the relationship between caregiving motivation and out-group prejudice.Shortcomings and future directions are addressed in the end of this article.