There is an I in Team: The Role of Social Group Membership on the Incidental Group-Reference Effect

Extending the self-reference effect (i.e., a memory advantage produced by self-referent encoding) to the level of social identities, previous research showed that processing information in reference to one's ingroup at encoding enhances memory for that information (i.e., the group-reference effect). Notably, recent work on the self-reference effect has shown that even simply co-presenting an item with self-relevant vs. other-relevant information (e.g., one's own or another person's name) at encoding can produce an "incidental" self-memory advantage in the absence of any task demand to evaluate the item's self-relevancy. The present study examined whether this "incidental" self-reference effect extends beyond the level of personal identity to the level of social identity using existing groups (Experiment 1; university affiliation) and newly-created, minimal groups (Experiment 2). In both experiments, during encoding, participants judged the location of each target word presented either above or below ingroup-relevant vs. outgroup-relevant information. In a subsequent memory test, we found an incidental group-reference effect under a minimal-group context (Experiment 2) but not under an existing group context (Experiment 1). Collectively, the present findings suggest that the emergence/magnitude of an incidental ingroup-memory advantage may depend on the salience of the ingroup vs. outgroup distinction at any given moment.

    Item Description
    Name(s)
    Thesis advisor: Kim, Kyungmi
    Date
    April 15, 2019
    Extent
    35 pages
    Language
    eng
    Genre
    Physical Form
    electronic
    Discipline
    Rights and Use
    In Copyright – Non-Commercial Use Permitted
    Restrictions on Use

    Access restricted until April 15, 2024. Please contact wesscholar@wesleyan.edu for more information.

    Digital Collection
    PID
    ir:1909