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Distinguishing Family from Friends

Implicit Cognitive Differences Regarding General Dispositions, Attitude Similarity, and Group Membership

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Abstract

Kinship and friendship are key human relationships. Increasingly, data suggest that people are not less altruistic toward friends than close kin. Some accounts suggest that psychologically we do not distinguish between them; countering this is evidence that kinship provides a unique explanatory factor. Using the Implicit Association Test, we examined how people implicitly think about close friends versus close kin in three contexts. In Experiment 1, we examined generic attitudinal dispositions toward friends and family. In Experiment 2, attitude similarity as a marker of family and friends was examined, and in Experiments 3 and 4, strength of in-group membership for family and friends was examined. Findings show that differences exist in implicit cognitive associations toward family and friends. There is some evidence that people hold more positive general dispositions toward friends, associate attitude similarity more with friends, consider family as more representative of the in-group than friends, but see friends as more in-group than distant kin.

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Notes

  1. In the standard use of IATs, to measure people’s general attitudes toward a target category or object, the attribute pairing (capturing the valence of the attitude toward the target) is typically either pleasant/unpleasant or positive/negative. With either attribute pairing, the measures are seen as capturing basic implicit attitudes toward the targets.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the British Academy for partial funding of this research (grant SG 48011). We would like to thank Brian Meier for supplying an E-Prime IAT template and Justin Park for sharing stimulus materials; Catherine Day, Kirsten Bartlett, Mary-Jane Budd, and Steve Southworth for data collection; and Mitch Callan and Gillian Sandstrom for comments on the manuscript.

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK

    Rick O’Gorman & Ruth Roberts

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  1. Rick O’Gorman
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Correspondence to Rick O’Gorman.

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O’Gorman, R., Roberts, R. Distinguishing Family from Friends. Hum Nat 28, 323–343 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-017-9292-0

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