The binding between representations of own team and self in perceptual matching

Abstract

People tend to respond faster to stimuli associated with themselves and their own team compared to stimuli relevant to other people and rival team. There is well-established evidence on these effects of self-bias and in-group bias, but little evidence for the relationship between such biases. This question was tested in the present studies by utilising a perceptual matching paradigm with a Posner’s Cueing task. In each experiment, we had participants tagging neutral geometric shapes to different labels – self, own team, another person (in a rival team), rival team and neutral team and then completed in a shape-label matching task where they had to judge whether shapes and labels matched. Once learnt the shape-label associations, the participants were only presented with the shapes as cues and targets in the Posner’s Cueing task, and participants had to identify the target as being self vs. other or own term vs. rival team. Four experiments consistently showed the self- and ingroup-bias effects in the perceptual matching task. Importantly, the ingroup cue promoted responses to the self-related target relative to the target associated with other people when the target fell in the location of the cue, but this was not the case for the rival team cue. The effect occurred regardless of the relative size of cues and targets in Studies 1 and 2. However, the self-related cue facilitated performance to the target associated with the ingroup team compared to the rival team exclusively when the target was smaller than the size of the cue in Study 3, and the effect disappeared when the target was larger than the cue in Study 4. The results indicated a natural binding conceptual representations of self and ingroup. The implications of these results are discussed.

Acknowledgement: National Nature Science Foundation of China (Project 31371017).