"People Like Us:" The Influence of Personal Deprivation and Group Membership Salience on Justice Evaluations

Abstract

The distinction between personal and social identities proposed by Social Identity theorists is used as a framework for investigating group relative deprivation. In the first experiment, the salience of membership in a collectively deprived group was crossed orthogonally with a payment manipulation; half the subjects learned that they would not be paid for their participation as they had expected and half the subjects learned that they still would be paid. As predicted, subjects for whom group membership was made salient and who experienced personal deprivation reported the greatest overall deprivation. However, "group-primed" subjects who experienced personal gratification reported the least overall deprivation. Group membership salience appeared to encourage these subjects to focus on their personal good fortune rather than their collective misfortune. The second experiment indicated that reduced reports of deprivation by gratified group-primed subjects reflect a conscious strategy which is not undermined by increasing the situational salience of the advantaged outgroup. Together, these experiments demonstrate how easily feelings of collective deprivation can be undermined if people enjoy a personal advantage.