Protecting the Ingroup: Motivated Allocation of Cognitive Resources in the Presence of Threatening Ingroup Members

Abstract

Research on the Black Sheep effect (Marques, Yzerbyt, & Leyens, 1988) suggests that motivational factors such as the level of identification with the ingroup influences the way people react against negative ingroup members. The present study tested the idea that people may invest a sizable amount of cognitive resources to protect their view of the ingroup when it is challenged by a negative target. We measured the identification of our participants, all students in psychology, with the larger group of psychologists and presented them with descriptions of four ingroup members, three positive and one negative. As expected, high identifiers gave a harsher judgment of the negative target than did low identifiers. In addition, participants’ performance on a secondary task confirmed that high identifiers devoted more resources than low identifiers to process the information about the negative member as compared to a positive ingroup member. These results stress the relationship between motivation and cognitive resources in general, and the Black Sheep effect and stereotyping in particular.