Mnemic neglect for behaviours enacted by members of one’s nationality group

Abstract

People exhibit impaired recall for highly self-threatening information that describes them, a phenomenon called the mnemic neglect effect (MNE). We hypothesized that the MNE extends to recall for information that highly threatens an individual’s important ingroup identity. We tested our hypothesis in two experiments in which participants read behaviors depicted as enacted by either ingroup members (Experiment 1 = American; Experiment 2 = British) or outgroup members (Andorrans). Participants recalled identity-threatening behaviors poorly when enacted by ingroup members, but not when enacted by outgroup members. Additional results evinced ingroup favoritism in: (1) evaluations of the two groups, and (2) trait judgments made from the behaviors, but only on traits central to the self. Finally, mediational analyses suggested that the group-driven memory differences are plausibly due to the global between-group evaluation differences, but not the perceived between-group trait judgment differences.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Bettina Zengel: orcid.org/0000-0002-0871-3158

ORCID for Tim Wildschut: orcid.org/0000-0002-6499-5487

ORCID for Constantine Sedikides: orcid.org/0000-0003-4036-889X

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