Abstract
Cognitive biases shape our perception of the world and our interactions with other people. Information related to the self and our social ingroups is prioritised for cognitive processing and can therefore form some of these key biases. However, ingroup biases may be elicited not only for established social groups, but also for minimal groups assigned by novel or random social categorisation. Moreover, whether these ‘ingroup biases’ are related to self-processing is unknown. Across three experiments, we utilised a social associative matching paradigm to examine whether the cognitive mechanisms underpinning the effects of minimal groups overlapped with those that prioritise the self, and whether minimal group allocation causes early processing advantages. We found significant advantages in response time and sensitivity (dprime) for stimuli associated with newly-assigned ingroups. Further, self-biases and ingroup-biases were positively correlated across individuals (Experiments 1 and 3). However, when the task was such that ingroup and self associations competed, only the self-advantage was detected (Experiment 2). These results demonstrate that even random group allocation quickly captures attention and enhances processing. Positive correlations between the self- and ingroup-biases suggest a common cognitive mechanism across individuals. These findings have implications for understanding how social biases filter our perception of the world.
Original language | English |
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Article number | 18933 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Scientific Reports |
Volume | 10 |
Early online date | 3 Nov 2020 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 3 Nov 2020 |
Bibliographical note
AcknowledgementsThis work was supported by a Medical Research Council Fellowship (MR/P014097/1), a Christ Church Junior Research Fellowship and a Christ Church Research Centre Grant to P. L. L. The Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging is supported by core funding from the Wellcome Trust (203139/Z/16/Z). The work was completed in partial fulfilment of a PhD funded through a DSTL studentship by the first author. We thank the late Professor Glyn Humphreys, who initially supervised the wider PhD project that this work formed a part of, for his helpful discussions and input into this research.