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Group membership affects spontaneous mental representation : Failure to represent the out-group in a joint action task

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McClung2013.pdf (449.4Kb)
Date
20/11/2013
Author
McClung, Jennifer Susan
Jentzsch, Ines
Reicher, Stephen David
Keywords
Social interaction
Joint action
Group membership
Social competition
Out-group members
BF Psychology
Metadata
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Abstract
Predicting others’ actions is crucial to successful social interaction. Previous research on joint action, based on a reaction-time paradigm called the Joint Simon Task, suggests that successful joint action stems from the simultaneous representation of the self with the other. Performance on this task provides a read-out of the degree of intrusion from a partner that participants experience from acting jointly compared to acting alone, which in turn is a measure of the degree to which participants mentally represent their co-actors during the task. To investigate the role of perceived group membership in this type of joint action and its influence on the representation of others, we first subjected participants to a minimal group paradigm while manipulating differences in social competition. We then asked participants to do the Joint Simon Task in pairs with an in-group or out-group member. Only participants who acted with an “in-group” partner on the joint task showed altered reaction times compared to when acting alone, presumably a change caused by the simultaneous and automatic representation of their in-group partner. In contrast, participants who acted with an out-group partner were unaffected in their reactions when doing the joint task, showing no evidence of representation of their out-group partner. This effect was present in both the high-competition and low-competition conditions, indicating that the differential effects of group membership on representation during joint action were driven by perceived group membership and independent of the effects of social competition. We concluded that participants failed to represent out-group members as socially relevant agents not based on any personality or situational characteristics, but in reaction only to their status as “other”. In this way group membership appears to affect cognition on a very immediate and subconscious level.
Citation
McClung , J S , Jentzsch , I & Reicher , S D 2013 , ' Group membership affects spontaneous mental representation : Failure to represent the out-group in a joint action task ' PLoS One , vol 8 , no. 11 , e79178 . DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0079178
Publication
PLoS One
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0079178
ISSN
1932-6203
Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2013 McClung et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
  • Psychology & Neuroscience Research
  • Institute of Behavioural and Neural Sciences Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4225

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