Minority adolescents compare within their group more than across groups

Evidence

To test these ideas, we have been engaged in a program of field and experimental work investigating the antecedents of comparison choices in intergroup settings. A clear conclusion from this work is that intragroup and temporal comparisons are at least as prevalent as intergroup comparisons and, moreover, group identification tends to more strongly related to the former kinds of comparisons than the latter. For example, in a longitudinal study of ethnic minority adolescents in the United Kingdom, participants were significantly more interested to compare with ingroup and temporal targets (intragroup, temporal, country of origin) than with all intergroup targets (other minorities, white British, North Americans, people in the developing world) (Zagefka, 2004). Moreover, the crosssectional data revealed that identification was positively correlated with interest in temporal and intragroup comparisons (with other ingroup members), but not with interest in comparing with any of the intergroup objects. Over time, identification negatively and causally predicted interest in several of the intergroup objects, namely “Americans,” the “developing world,” and members of “other minorities.” Similar findings have been obtained with other ethnic minority samples in Britain and Germany (Zagefka & Brown, in press). These results seem to support Allport rather than Social Identity Theory. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 452