When threatened by own-group and others, to please or disengage?

Abstract

Threats from both distinctiveness with the outgroup and prototypicality as an ingroup members were introduced, and the interacting effect of both threats along with ingroup identification on inter- and intra-group evaluations were investigated. Based on various social identity theories, it is predicted that under the above mentioned two threats, high identifiers are likely to show accentuated ingroup bias, whereas low identifiers have the highest tendency to leave the group through and is expressed through the lowered exertion of ingroup bias. The results, though weak, revealed support for the predicted hypothesis.