Toward an explanation of cultural differences in in-group favoritism: The role of individual versus collective primacy

Previous research conducted on a western sample has shown that people are l ess apt to exhibit ingroup favoritism when they perform well individually w hile their in-group performs poorly. The authors evaluated whether this fin ding would be moderated by the cultural dimension of individual-collective primacy, which refers to whether people give more weight to their personal interests rather than their in-group's interests when forced to choose betw een the two. The authors hypothesized that relative to their counterparts f rom the United States, participants from the People's Republic of China wou ld have more of a collective-primacy orientation and therefore would exhibi t more ingroup favoritism when they performed well individually while their in-group performed poorly The results supported the hypothesis. Implicatio ns for the literatures on in-group favoritism and crosscultural differences are discussed.