In-group modulation of perceptual matching

Zargol Moradi* (Corresponding Author), Jie Sui, Miles Hewstone, Glyn W Humphreys

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

46 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We report a novel effect of in-group bias on a task requiring simple perceptual matching of stimuli. Football fans were instructed to associate the badges of their favorite football team (in-group), a rival team (out-group), and neutral teams with simple geometric shapes. Responses to matching in-group stimuli were more efficient, and discriminability was enhanced, as compared to out-group stimuli (rival and neutral)—a result that occurred even when participants responded only to the (equally familiar) geometric shapes. Across individuals, the in-group bias on shape matching was correlated with measures of group satisfaction, and similar results were found when football fans performed the task, in the context of both the football ground and a laboratory setting. We also observed effects of in-group bias on the response criteria in some but not all of the experiments. In control studies, the advantage for in-group stimuli was not found in an independent sample of participants who were not football fans. This indicates that there was not an intrinsic advantage for the stimuli that were “in-group” for football fans. Also, performance did not differ for familiar versus unfamiliar stimuli without in-group associations. These findings indicate that group identification can affect simple shape matching.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1255-1277
Number of pages22
JournalPsychonomic Bulletin and Review
Volume22
Early online date13 Jan 2015
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2015

Bibliographical note

This work was supported by grants from the Leverhulme Trust to the third and fourth authors, by ERC Advanced Investigator Award No. 323833 (PePe) to the fourth author, and by a grant from the National Science Foundation, China, to the second author. The work was conducted in partial fulfillment of a PhD by the first author.

Keywords

  • Cognitive bias
  • In-group bias
  • Out-group bias
  • Football fans

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