When Common Identities Reduce Between-Group Helping

Abstract

Emphasizing a common group identity is often suggested as a way to promote between-group helping. But recently, researchers have identified a set of strategic motives for helping other groups, including the desire to present the own group as warm and generous. When the motive for helping is strategic, a salient common identity should reduce the willingness to help another group, because the help no longer communicates a quality of the ingroup (only of the common group). The authors tested this hypothesis in two experiments, in which they assessed beliefs about helping (Study 1) and actual helping through behavioral observation (Study 2). The results fully supported the predictions, demonstrating that a common identity is not a universal tool for the promotion of prosocial behavior. The studies also illustrate the strategic nature of between-group helping, in which acts that appear prosocial on the surface are in fact intended to enhance the ingroup's image.

The Psychology of Charitable Donations to Disaster Victims and Beyond

“…From a practitioner's point of view, the conclusions to be drawn are that more donations will be elicited if victims are perceived to be joint members of the same social category as the donor (but, see van Leeuwen & Mashuri, ). Recategorization techniques have been tested extensively in interventions designed to improve intergroup relations, and they can be achieved by making salient a superordinate category shared by the potential helper and helpee.…”

“…There are some suggestions that power relations and strategic considerations often play a pivotal role in intergroup helping (see, e.g., van Leeuwen & Mashuri, ; van Leeuwen & Täuber, ). As demonstrated by Nadler (), we can distinguish between autonomy‐oriented and dependency‐oriented helping, with the former being aimed at true empowerment and the latter aimed at maintaining a certain power differential.…”

Remember your crimes: How an appeal to ingroup wrongdoings fosters reconciliation in separatist conflict

“…Of particular relevance is work by Morton and Postmes (), who found that a perception of the ultimate ‘we‐ness’, that is, the perception of shared humanity with the victim group, depressed the perpetrating group's feelings of collective guilt over their harmful actions towards the victim group. Van Leeuwen and Mashuri () also showed that perceptions of a shared superordinate identity, compared to perceptions of two distinct identities, suppressed cooperative tendencies towards the outgroup. It is therefore important to examine whether members of a majority group in the context of separatist conflict are willing to accept responsibility for their harmful actions towards the separatist group, and whether this sense of perpetratorhood fosters reconciliatory attitudes.…”

The combined effects of meta-stereotypes and audience on outgroup and ingroup helping.

“…Moreover, outgroup helping could be directly linked to group members' concerns about their ingroup's image. Van Leeuwen and Mashuri (2012) also found that the effect of meta-stereotype salience on outgroup helping disappeared when attention was diverted away from the ingroup through the enhanced salience of a shared, superordinate identity. These effects are further corroborated by recent research demonstrating that the motivation to seek help from another group decreased when group members believed the outgroup viewed their ingroup as dependent, suggesting that group members are willing to sacrifice the possibility of accessing needed help to avoid a possible confirmation of a negative stereotype of their group (Wakefield, Hopkins, & Greenwood, 2013).…”