Department of Psychology, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155, USA.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2010 Mar;98(3):343-55. doi: 10.1037/a0018589.
The preferential allocation of attention and memory to the ingroup (the ingroup memory advantage) is one of the most replicated effects in the psychological literature. But little is known about what factors may influence such effects. Here the authors investigated a potential influence: category salience as determined by the perceiver's geographic environment. They did so by studying the ingroup memory advantage in perceptually ambiguous groups for whom perceptual cues do not make group membership immediately salient. Individuals in an environment in which a particular group membership was salient (Mormon and non-Mormon men and women living in Salt Lake City, Utah) showed better memory for faces belonging to their ingroup in an incidental encoding paradigm. Majority group participants in an environment where this group membership was not salient (non-Mormon men and women in the northeastern United States), however, showed no ingroup memory advantage whereas minority group participants (Mormons) in the same environment did. But in the same environment, when differences in group membership were made accessible via an unobtrusive priming task, non-Mormons did show an ingroup memory advantage and Mormons' memory for ingroup members increased. Environmental context cues therefore influence the ingroup memory advantage for categories that are not intrinsically salient.
内群体（内群体记忆优势）的注意力和记忆的优先分配是心理文献中最具可重复性的效应之一。但人们对内群记忆优势的影响因素知之甚少。作者通过研究那些知觉线索不能立即凸显群体成员身份的知觉模糊群体中的内群记忆优势来探讨潜在的影响因素：感知者所处的地理环境决定的类别显著性。他们在美国犹他州盐湖城居住的摩门教和非摩门教男性和女性中进行了研究，这些人生活的环境中，某一群体成员身份是显著的（在偶然的编码范式中，他们对属于自己群体的面孔的记忆更好）。在一个环境中，群体成员身份不显著的情况下（美国东北部的非摩门教男性和女性），多数群体参与者没有内群记忆优势，而在相同环境中的少数群体参与者（摩门教徒）则有内群记忆优势。但是，在相同的环境中，当通过一种不显眼的启动任务使群体成员身份的差异变得可及，非摩门教徒确实表现出内群记忆优势，而摩门教徒对群体成员的记忆也增加了。因此，环境背景线索会影响那些本身不显著的类别中的内群记忆优势。
