A Social Identity Threat and Experienced Affect: the Distinct Roles of Intergroup Attributions and Social Identification

I investigated the moderating role of ingroup identification on the relationship between the affective state experienced and the causal attributions made for social identity threatening outcomes of intergroup comparisons. For people under such conditions, on the basis of prior research, I expected that affect unpleasantness is positively correlated with attributions for outgroup merits to the extent that social identification is strong. Furthermore, I hypothesized that perceived legitimacy of the intergroup status differential mediates such a relationship. I found support for these predictions by providing psychology students with bogus research results concerning the lower academic achievements of their own group relative to medicine students. Combining the findings of two distinct literatures, the present study traces the sources of the affective processes that social identity threatening intergroup comparisons set in motion as a function of ingroup identification when people make ingroup relevant attributions. Current Research in Social Psychology (Vol. 10, No. 10) (Costarelli)