The treatment of relevant and irrelevant outgroups in minimal group situations with crossed categorizations

Among a sample of Belgian high school boys, the author attempted to determi ne on the basis of social identity theory (H. Tajfel & J. C. Turner, 1979) whether an out-group's relevancy in intergroup comparisons influences the a mount of intergroup discrimination. Relevancy was manipulated by the use of 2 trivial categorization dimensions that were orthogonally crossed. In 1 o f the crossed categorization conditions, this procedure resulted in the for mation of 4 groups, whereas in the 2nd condition, only 2 of these groups we re effectively formed. Nevertheless, the participants in both conditions we re instructed to evaluate 4 groups-either 4 actual groups (1st condition) o r 2 actual and 2 hypothetical groups (2nd condition). In both conditions, t he intergroup evaluations exhibited the same pattern-that is, they did not differentiate their ingroups from the partly overlapping groups but were cl early biased against the double outgroup.