Social Categorization and Stimulus Equivalence: A Systematic Replication

Abstract

A systematic replication of Watt, Keenan, Barnes, and Cairns (1991) was conducted on two groups of Norwegian soccer supporters. The 24 participants were trained conditional discriminations for the emergence of three 3-member equivalence classes, when members of two of the classes were assumed to be part of the participants' preexperimental history. The stimuli used in these classes were pictures or names of soccer players relevant to their own team or the rivaling team. Participants were trained in a linear training structure before the test. The test was split into three test blocks. Test Block 1, a replication of Watt et al.'s (1991) equivalence test, Test Block 2 an adapted generalization test and Test Block 3 an updated equivalence test. The results in Test Block 1 replicated what was found in 1991, but Test Block 3 did not replicate the same results. In Test Block 2, participants scored as expected and the response patterns were distinctly different between the test groups and the Control Group. Also, the time used to finish the experiment by the soccer team supporters were significantly higher than by participants who had no interest in soccer. This difference was also reflected in the reaction times the participant showed on the emergent relations in test blocks 1 and 3. A correlation was found between the number of expected scores on the questionnaire and the number of passes in Test Block 1. However, no correlation was found in the number of participants who passed in Test Block 3. The study by Watt et al. (1991) was not found to generalize to the context in the current study. However, the extended parts in the study had some promising results on how social categorization can be studied in the derived stimulus paradigm.