Lee Victoria K, Kranton Rachel E, Conzo Pierluigi, Huettel Scott A
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University.
Department of Economics, Duke University.
J Econ Psychol. 2021 Oct;86. doi: 10.1016/j.joep.2021.102424. Epub 2021 Jul 23.
This paper reports robust experimental evidence that humanization-in the form of individuating information about another's personal preferences-leads to decreased prosocial behavior toward in-group members. Previous research shows that this information increases prosocial behavior toward dehumanized out-group members. The consequences for in-group members, however, are less well understood. Using methods from social psychology and behavioral economics, four experiments show that individuating information decreases pro-social behavior toward in-group members in a variety of settings (charitable giving, altruistic punishment, and trust games). Moreover, this effect results from decreased reliance on group membership labels, and not from other potential explanations like the induction of new group identities. Understanding these effects sheds light on the motives behind intergroup conflict, which may not result from a difference in social perception (i.e., humanized in-groups and dehumanized out-groups), but rather from biases associated with group membership (i.e. in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination) that are eliminated by individuating information. Together, these results indicate that humanization carries a hidden cost for in-group members by disrupting group identities that would otherwise make them targets of altruistic actions.
本文报告了有力的实验证据，即人性化——以关于他人个人偏好的个性化信息的形式——会导致对群体内成员的亲社会行为减少。先前的研究表明，这种信息会增加对被非人化的群体外成员的亲社会行为。然而，对于群体内成员的影响却了解得较少。通过运用社会心理学和行为经济学的方法，四项实验表明，在各种情境（慈善捐赠、利他惩罚和信任游戏）中，个性化信息都会减少对群体内成员的亲社会行为。此外，这种效应是由于对群体成员身份标签的依赖减少所致，而非来自其他潜在的解释，如新群体身份的诱导。理解这些效应有助于揭示群体间冲突背后的动机，群体间冲突可能并非源于社会认知的差异（即被人性化的群体内和被非人化的群体外），而是源于与群体成员身份相关的偏见（即群体内偏袒和群体外歧视），而个性化信息会消除这些偏见。总之，这些结果表明，人性化会给群体内成员带来隐性成本，因为它会破坏群体身份，否则这些群体身份会使他们成为利他行为的对象。
