Enhancing collective and personal self-esteem through differentiation: Further exploration of Hinkle & Brown's taxonomy

The present study investigated hypotheses concerning the relationship betwe en strength of social identification and intergroup differentiation and bet ween personal self-esteem and self-serving bias for groups in the relationa l quadrants of Hinkle & Brown's taxonomy. Thirty groups each of individuali sts and collectivists were randomly assigned to either a compatible or an i ncompatible goal condition. During 10, 20-second trials, subjects worked on the Tarkus Block task in which they built their own tower and a group towe r as high as possible. Afterwards, they evaluated their own group, the outg roup, themselves, and another member of the ingroup on attitude and task pe rformance scales. Then they completed a group identification scale and a st ate self-esteem scale. For collectivists, a significant relationship was fo und between strength of group identification and intergroup differentiation when personal and group goals were compatible, and between self-esteem and self-serving bias when personal and group goals were incompatible. Further , the correlations for individualists were opposite to those found for coll ectivists, although only one of the correlations was significant. These une xpected and interesting results qualify and add to the findings from other research which show that the identity-differentiation relationship is usual ly the strongest for collectivists in a relational intergroup context.