In-group relevance facilitates learning across existing and new associations

Journal article

Studies have shown that attention prioritizes stimuli associated with the in-group. However, the extent to which this so called ‘in-group favoritism’ is driven by relevance is not clear. Here, we investigated this issue in a group of university rowers using a novel perceptual matching task based on the team label-color associations. Across three Experiments participants showed enhanced performance for the in-group stimulus regardless of its familiarity level. These findings confirmed the role of relevance in in-group favoritism. In a further control study, the advantage for certain stimuli was not found in an independent sample of participants who were not identified with the teams but were familiar with the label-color associations, indicating that in-group relevance was necessary for the in-group favoritism. Together these findings suggest that in-group relevance facilitates learning across existing and new associations. The consequences of these findings for understanding in-group effects on perceptual processing are discussed.

Authors: Moradi, Z; Sui, J; Hewstone, M; Humphreys, G

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: European Journal of Social Psychology
• Volume: 47
• Issue: 6
• Pages: 763-774
• Publication date: 2017-05-23
• Acceptance date: 2016-09-02
• DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.2257
• EISSN: 1099-0992
• ISSN: 0046-2772
• Keywords: In-group relevance; In-group favoritism; Perceptual matching