The distinction between ingroup and outgroup has played an important role in group process research. However, much less attention has been paid to variations among ingroups. In this study, we attempted to demonstrate that different ingroups could have different psychological impacts on self and group serving or effacing behavior. In our social survey, Japanese respondents evaluated the importance and psychological meaning of two typical ingroups their family and another social group in which they spent most of their time. They were also asked about their behavior in the presence of ingroup members from each group. Results indicated that people showed a self-effacing tendency in the social group, whereas they showed a self-serving tendency in their family. At the same time, they showed a group-serving tendency when they talked about the social group, but they showed the opposite, i.e., a group-effacing tendency, when they talked about their family. These differences are explained in terms of relationships with ingroup members.
This study investigated the unit of activation in on-line inferences. To explore whether the activation of inferences is a word-unit or a proposition-unit, a meaningfulness-decision task was devised as a priming measure. The task required participants to decide whether a series of short sentences was meaningful or not. The result of Experiment 1 suggested that only proposition-units were activated. A priming effect was observed in targets which described inferences both at word-level and proposition-level, but not in targets which described inferences at word-level only. In Experiment 2, a meaningfulness-decision task was administered to investigate word-based priming and to make sure that the result of Experiment 1 was not caused by characteristics of the task. In Experiment 3, a priming effect was found in targets which described inferences using alternative perspectives and words. These results suggest that the unit of activation in on-line inferences is proposition-units and that these activations relate to the proposition-semantic level, not the word or single-concept level.