Accountability suppresses ingroup favoritism, especially among majority members

Evidence

Dobbs and Crano (2001), for example, found that merely making allocators accountable in a minimal group reward distribution task mitigated in-group favoritism, and this tendency was especially pronounced when the allocator was of majority group status. Such participants appeared unwilling to overallocate positive reinforcements to fellow majority in-group members at the expense of members of minority out-groups. Apparently, even in-group favoritism has its limits. — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1380

Categorization

• XREF: Complicates the blanket ‘ingroup favoritism is automatic and unstoppable’ claim often drawn from minimal-group research, feeding the reader’s prejudice-mechanism thread. — connects to: Leaders gain support by favoring ingroup members over even-handedness — Stephen Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam, and Nick Hopkins, Social identity and the dynamics of…, 49
• QUESTION: Does accountability curb favoritism because it triggers norm-salience and reputational concern, or because it invokes fairness scripts the majority already endorse?
• SHARE: Good for a colleague working on implicit bias/debiasing interventions — an accountability nudge shrinking real allocative discrimination in an experimental setting.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1380