The Impact of Loyalty and Equality on Implicit Ingroup Favoritism

Cristina Zogmaister (1) , Luciano Arcuri (2) , Luigi Castelli (2) , Eliot R. Smith (3)

1 UNIMIB - Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca = University of Milano-Bicocca
2 Medical and Surgical Sciences
3 Indiana University

Extending recent investigations into the malleability of implicit ingroup favoritism, three experiments examined the role of indirect activation of equality and loyalty. Results showed that priming equality decreased implicit favoritism, measured through the Implicit Association Test and Go/No-Go Association Task, whereas priming loyalty enhanced it; spontaneous behavior (seating distance) was similarly influenced. A boundary condition was observed, namely change of intergroup setting: the effects of priming equality and loyalty ceased when these were primed after an irrelevant ingroup identity was made salient. In general, implicit favoritism can be reduced or increased after the activation of equality and loyalty respectively, and this underlines the importance of tackling discrimination by both lessening its expression, and removing factors that exacerbate it.

Mots clés: equality; implicit ingroup favoritism; intergroup behavior; loyalty; prejudice malleability

Cristina Zogmaister, Luciano Arcuri, Luigi Castelli, Eliot R. Smith. The Impact of Loyalty and Equality on Implicit Ingroup Favoritism. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 2008, 11 (4), pp.493-512. ⟨10.1177/1368430208095402⟩. ⟨hal-00571701⟩