When fiends become friends: The need to belong and perceptions of personal and group discrimination.

Abstract

The present article examines the role that the need to belong (NTB) plays in people's judgments of personal and group discrimination and in the attributions people make for potentially discriminatory evaluations. The authors hypothesized that the NTB motivates people to conclude that (a) whereas they rarely experience personal discrimination, (b) their fellow in-group members do experience discrimination. In Study 1, people high in the NTB reported experiencing lower than average levels of personal and higher than average levels of group discrimination. In Study 2, an experimental manipulation of the NTB yielded similar results. In Study 3, women who were motivated to be accepted by a bogus male participant were less likely to attribute his negative evaluations of their work to prejudice.

Forgiveness and the Need to Belong

“…In sum, across three studies that utilized different methods (i.e., correlational and experimental) and tapped different aspects of forgiveness (dispositional forgiveness, forgiveness of hypothetical offenses, and state forgiveness for past offenses), we consistently found that the need to belong was negatively associated with forgiveness. Taken together, these studies break new ground by linking the need to belong with how people respond to interpersonal transgressions and contribute to the literature on how this fundamental motivation relates to important constructs in social psychology (e.g., Carvallo & Pelham, 2006;DeWall et al, 2008;Mellor et al, 2008).…”

“…Scholars have invoked the need to belong in research on the personal-group discrimination discrepancy (Carvallo & Pelham, 2006), dismissing avoidant attachment style (Carvallo & Gabriel, 2006), sensitivity to social cues (Pickett, Gardner, & Knowles, 2004), self-regulatory performance (DeWall, Baumeister, & Vohs, 2008), suicide (Joiner, Hollar, & Van Orden, 2006), cooperation in public goods dilemmas (De Cremer & Leonardelli, 2003), life and relationship satisfaction (Mellor, Stokes, Firth, Hayashi, & Cummins, 2008), and homesickness (Watt & Badger, 2009). In the present article, we seek to expand on the existing literature by linking the need to belong with interpersonal forgiveness.…”

“…We once again pitted Hypothesis 1 against Hypothesis 2 in this experiment, reasoning from the results of Study 1 that individuals whose belongingness needs are satisfied would feel relatively more secure in others' acceptance of them than would individuals whose desires for belongingness were left unaltered (see Carvallo & Pelham, 2006). Manipulating belongingness satisfaction in this way, we hoped to create momentarily high and low need to belong groups experimentally analogous to the high and low scorers on the NTBS in Study 1.…”

Gay men’s identity work and the social construction of discrimination

“…Research shows that participants are strongly influenced by information about intent and harm; for example, people are much more likely to make an attribution of discrimination if there is information that the actor intended to discriminate and/ or that the target experienced material or emotional harm (Swim, Scott, Sechrist, Campbell, & Stangor, 2003). Minorities who identify strongly with their ingroup are more likely to make attributions to discrimination (Sellers, & Shelton, 2003), but this may be counterbalanced by their motivation to fit in with other people more generally (Carvallo and Pelham (2006). Based on this research, we might expect that men who strongly identify with being gay will be more likely to make attributions of discrimination (because they are more alert to There are therefore some interesting parallels between the experimental and qualitative literatures, despite their methodological and ontological differences.…”

Negative Outgroup Leader Actions Increase Liking for Ingroup Leaders: An Experimental Test of Intergroup Leader-Enhancement Effects

“…This particular subscale has been used by many researchers as a measure of group identifi cation (Carvallo & Pelham, 2006;Chen, Chen, & Shaw, 2004;Eccleston & Major, 2006;Sellers, Rowley, Chavous, Shelton, & Smith, 1997;Vorauer & Turpie, 2004). The subscale conceptualizes identity as the importance of the group to self-concept and self-defi nition and is often recognized as conceptually tapping identifi cation rather than self-esteem (Ahlering, 2003;Branscombe, Schmitt, & Harvey, 1999;Cassidy, O'Connor, Howe, & Warden, 2004), serving as an explicit measure of the importance of collective identity (Ashmore, Deaux, & McLaughlin-Volpe, 2004).…”