Abstract
Despite their application in virtually every area of psychological science, indirect procedures have rarely been used to study how Catholic and Protestants automatically respond to one another in Northern Ireland. What little evidence that does exist suggests that automatic ingroup favoritism occurs alongside outgroup derogation. That is, Catholics and Protestants automatically evaluate ingroup members more positively than outgroup members, and also evaluate outgroup members more negatively than ingroup members. The current study addresses a methodological limitation in this early work and provides the first (non-relativistic) assessment of intergroup relational responding in a post-conflict setting using the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP). Contrary to earlier findings, participants displayed evidence of ingroup favoritism in the absence of outgroup derogation.
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Notes
Let us be clear from the outset. Stating that IRAP effects are non-relative is not the same as saying that they are a-contextual. Non-relative denotes that the effect itself is calculated in a way that is independent from other trial types (i.e., what we say about the Catholics-Good trial type is inferred from the speed with which people affirm versus reject the Catholic-Good relation, and does not depend on how quickly they responded to “Catholics” and negative terms or “Protestants” and positive or negative terms). Nevertheless, this does not mean non-relativistic trial-type effects are a-contextual. In other words, the relational response on any given trial, and thus the effects calculated from those responses, could be moderated by contextual variables that are part of the IRAP or the wider context in which the IRAP is embedded (for more on non-relative vs. a-contextual, see Hussey et al., 2016). We will return to this issue in greater detail later on in the General Discussion.
The terms “ingroup favoritism” and “outgroup derogation” are often used in the social psychological literature to refer to a set of mental concepts and processes (see Dasgupta, 2004). Although we will use those same terms in this paper, we make no appeals to, or assumptions about, those mental mechanisms. Instead, we simply use these terms to orient the reader towards specific patterns of behavior (relational responses) that are emitted by members of different groups (Catholics and Protestants) in the presence of certain stimuli (ingroup vs. outgroup exemplars and trait descriptions).
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Acknowledgements
The second author was supported by an Odysseus (Type 1) award from the Flanders Science Foundation (FWO) during preparation of this article. Electronic mail should be sent to sean.hughes@ugent.be. This paper is dedicated the memory of Ed Cairns, who inspired and facilitated this particular line of research.
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This study was funded by a postgraduate scholarship to the first author from the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering, and Technology (IRCSET).
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The authors (SH, DBH, and SS) declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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All procedures performed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the host institution and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments.
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This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
Appendices
Appendix A
Examples of the four trial types used in the IRAP. The label stimuli (e.g., “Catholics” and “Protestants”), target stimuli (e.g., “friendly” and “violent”) and relational response options (“True” and “False”) are indicated
Mean D- IRAP scores as a function of Community Background (Catholic vs. Protestant). A positive value indicates a positivity bias while a negative score indicates a negativity bias towards a given group. Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals
Mean self-reported evaluative responses as a function of Community Background (Catholic vs. Protestant). Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals
Appendix B
D-IRAP scores can be calculated in the following way: (1) discard response-latency data from practice blocks and only use test blocks data; (2) eliminate latencies above 10,000 ms from the data set; (3) remove all data for a participant if he or she produces more than 10% of test-block trials with latencies less than 300 ms; (4) compute 12 standard deviations for the four trial types: four from the response latencies from Test Blocks 1 and 2, four from the latencies from Test Blocks 3 and 4, and four from Test Blocks 5 and 6; (5) calculate the mean latencies for the four trial types in each test block (resulting in 24 mean latencies in total); (6) calculate difference scores for each of the four trial types for each pair of test blocks by subtracting the mean latency of the Rule A block from the mean latency of the corresponding Rule B block; (7) divide each difference score by its corresponding standard deviation (see step 4). This yields 12 D-IRAP scores, one score for each trial type for each pair of test blocks. Finally, (8) calculate four overall trial type scores by averaging the scores for each trial type across the three pairs of test blocks. Note that these four trial-type scores can be collapsed into an overall D-IRAP score if the researcher so chooses.
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Hughes, S., Barnes-Holmes, D. & Smyth, S. Implicit Cross-Community Biases Revisited: Evidence for Ingroup Favoritism in the Absence of Outgroup Derogation in Northern Ireland. Psychol Rec 67, 97–107 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-016-0210-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-016-0210-3