Implicit Versus Explicit Strategies of Out-Group Discrimination

Abstract

This article addresses the role of intentional control in intergroup favouritism and out-group discrimination. We hypothesise that explicit strategies of discrimination (reward allocation, trait attributions) are under people's intentional control, whereas the linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) represents a strategy that allows relatively little conscious control. An experiment is reported in which basketball fans (N = 88) of two different teams were compared, one known for its uninhibited expression of intergroup hostility, the other known for considering aggressive behaviours unacceptable. Aggressive fans showed greater out-group discrimination than unaggressive fans on reward allocation and trait attribution, but comparable degrees of LIB. This suggests that on explicit tasks such as reward allocation, out-group discrimination can be inhibited relatively easily, whereas intentional control appears considerably more difficult for subtle differences in language abstraction. The LIB may therefore constitute a useful tool for assessing prejudice while minimising the impact of social desirability considerations.

From the individual to the group: The enhancement of linguistic bias

“…Conversely, they apply across different meaning fields (Semin, 2007) and escape conscious access (e.g. Franco & Maass, 1996;Rubini & Kruglanski, 1997). Therefore, other group reallife situations or tasks can elicit multiple enhancement effects in language use, such as an extreme linguistic 'particularization'.…”

Labelling and discrimination: Do homophobic epithets undermine fair distribution of resources?

“…It does not represent fairness nor a clearly ingroup-favouring strategy. Due to its mixed nature, this strategy is difficult to interpret (Franco & Maass, 1996;Hogg, Turner, Nascimento-Schulze, & Spriggs, 1986), and generally receives less attention (e.g., Castelli & Carraro, 2010;Shepherd, Spears, & Manstead, 2013).…”

“…We therefore calculated an Intergroup Bias Index based only on the first three strategies. Following the procedure outlined by Brown (1978; see also Franco & Maass, 1996), we first calculated the strength of each strategy that could range from À4 to +4. Positive scores indicate a stronger use of the strategy, whereas negative scores indicate stronger avoidance of the strategy under consideration.…”

How normative and social identification processes predict self‐determination to engage in derogatory behaviours against outgroup hockey fans

“…Such behaviours range from a biased evaluation of one's ingroup team over the outgroup team (Wann & Branscombe, 1995), to name calling and singing denigrating songs about the outgroup team (Scheepers, Spears, Doosje, & Manstead, 2003, and even to behaviours such as overt aggression, hooliganism, and riots observed, for example, in football/soccer (Stott, Adang, Livingstone, & Schreiber, 2007;Stott, Hutchison, & Drury, 2001) and in ice hockey (Harrell, 1981). Groups of fans also differ in which type of derogatory behaviour they encourage their members to engage in, with some groups of fans endorsing norms in favour of derogatory behaviours more than others (e.g., Franco & Maass, 1996;Stott et al, 2001Stott et al, , 2007.…”