When personal identities confirm versus conflict with group identities: Evidence from an intergroup paradigm

This study provides an experimental investigation of the consequences of conflict between children’s personal identities and experimentally manipulated group identities. Elementary-school-aged children (N ¼82, ages 5‐11) attending a summer school program rated their own academic and athletic abilities and were then randomly assigned to one of two novel groups. Children’s views of the academic and athletic skills of the novel groups were assessed both before and after information about the groups’ academic and athletic skills was manipulated via posters placed in their classrooms. Following the manipulation, children’s self-views, ingroup identification, and intergroup attitudes were assessed. Results indicated that (a) in the absence of information about the novel groups, children projected their personal identities onto their ingroup identities, (b) children maintained their ingroup identities in the face of new information that should have altered their ingroup identities, and (c) more positive personal identities predicted ingroup bias, which in turn predicted happiness with one’s ingroup membership. The latter finding suggests that a tendency forchildren to generalize from their idiosyncratic positive self-views, rather than an indiscriminate desire for self-enhancement or positivity, may be responsible for ingroup bias. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Just as people have perceptions of themselves as individuals (i.e., personal identities), they also have perceptions of the groups of which they are members (i.e., group identities). Often personal identities agree with group identities: males often perceive both themselves and their group as strong and skilled at math, so too females often perceive themselves and their group as kind and skilled at reading. At times, however, individuals’ personal identities differ from their ingroup identities. The outcome of clashes between children’s personal identities and their experimentally manipulated group identities are the focus of this report. We were specifically interested in the impact of membership in groups that either confirmed or conflicted with their personal identities on children’s subsequent views of themselves and their ingroup. The process of integrating group and personal identity is unlikely to be uniform across types of groups. So, for example, some group memberships are fixed at birth (e.g., gender), whereas others are voluntarily selected (e.g., political party). An individual whose personal identity is discrepant from that of a voluntarily selected group might choose to leave the group, an impossible or impractical option for a fixed group membership such as gender. In addition, some group memberships are associated with well-known cultural stereotypes (e.g., race), whereas others carry few associations (e.g., handedness). The integration process may well be more complex when group identities carry stereotypic associations than when they are closer to blank slates. In this study, we sought to examine the process of integration of personal and group identities when group membership is both (a) involuntary and fixed and (b) associated with specific traits.