Is What You Feel What They See? Prominent and Subtle Identity Signaling in Intergroup Interactions

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Individuals often signal group affiliations to others, and the display of such identity signals is frequently rather subtle. While prior work has focused on understanding an individual's choices of subtle versus prominent signals, in this work, we look at the downstream consequences of such choices. Specifically, we explore how the prominence of identity signals may affect one's behavior in intergroup interactions. Drawing from literature on processing fluency, we propose that the use of difficult to process (subtle) identity signals in intergroup interactions leads signalers to experience identity threat, lowering confidence in their identity and leading them to engage in behaviors to recover from this experience. Across three different identity domains (college affiliation, political affiliation, and brand loyalty), we show that when individuals use difficult to process identity signals, they derogate out-group members in communication and behave less cooperatively in intergroup interactions. We find that these effects depend upon the observability of the signals by out-group members and only occur for individuals who are highly identified with the in-group. We also find that the effects are attenuated when behavior towards members of the out-group is made public.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)828-842
Number of pages15
JournalJournal of Behavioral Decision Making
Volume30
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2017
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • identity threat
  • intergroup interaction
  • processing fluency
  • signaling

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Decision Sciences
  • Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
  • Applied Psychology
  • Sociology and Political Science
  • Strategy and Management

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Is What You Feel What They See? Prominent and Subtle Identity Signaling in Intergroup Interactions'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this