Breaking the link between ingroup projection and outgroup derogation : encouraging civility in disagreements about social responsibility

Important but broad values such as "social responsibility" are understood differently by different groups, understandings that often reflect the values and traits of the ingroup. This research examines whether the tendency to project the characteristics of the ingroup onto understandings of “social responsibility” correlates with negative intergroup attitudes as would be expected on the basis of the ingroup projection literature. Building on recent research, we also examined whether reassuring people of their group’s identification as socially responsible might remove the correlation between projection and negative outgroups attitudes without reducing the rate of projection. Two experimental studies using the ingroup projection model provide support for these expectations. The research was conducted at a secular university (N = 188) and a religious university (N = 69) that profess different understandings of social responsibility. At both universities, projection and negative attitudes were correlated when the ingroup’s membership in the broader category of socially responsible students was threatened and in the control condition, but not when their membership in the broader category was reassured. Importantly, the rates of projection did not differ across the three conditions (control, threat, and reassurance), suggesting that reassurance does not reduce projection, but rather changes its defensive nature. These findings suggest the value of reassuring groups of their membership within broad, abstract categories, as it may allow for the kinds of conceptual disagreements that make up healthy societal debate while simultaneously discouraging the tendency for those disagreements to spill over into more general negative intergroup attitudes.