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Motivated reasoning and the attribution of emotions to ingroup and outgroup

Raisonnement motivationnel et l’attribution d’émotions à l’endogroupe et à l’exogroupe

Ruth Gaunt *Jacques-Philippe Leyens **

Denis Sindic **

Key-words

Ingroup and outgroup,emotion attribution,motivated reasoning

Mots-clés

endogroupe etexogroupe, attributiond’émotions, raisonne-

ment motivationnel

Résumé

Cette étude examine comment lamotivation à percevoir l’endogroupecomme plus humain que l’exo-groupe affecte l’utilisation d’infor-mations situationnelles pouréliminer l’attribution d’émotions. Lessujets lisaient une dissertation danslaquelle l’auteur décrivait sa façon deressentir certaines émotions.L’appartenance groupale de l’auteur,le type d’émotions exprimées, et lescontraintes situationnelles étaientmanipulées. Les résultats ont montréque les contraintes situationnellesréduisaient l’attribution correspon-dante d’émotion uniquement dansle cas où un membre de l’exogroupeexprimait des émotions typiquementhumaines. En fait, lorsqu’ils étaientmotivés à éviter une attributioncorrespondante indésirable, lessujets étaient davantage sensibles auxcontraintes situationnelles. Ces résul-tats sont discutés en termes deprocessus de raisonnement motivéet de motivation à dénigrer l’exo-groupe.

Abstract

The present study examined howthe motivation to perceive theingroup as more human than theoutgroup affects the use of situa-tional information to discount attri-bution of emotions. Participantsread an essay describing the write-r’s tendency to experience certainemotions. The writer’s groupmembership, type of expressedemotions and situational demandswere varied. The results showedthat situational demands reducedcorrespondent emotion attributiononly when an outgroup memberexpressed uniquely humanemotions. Thus, when motivated toavoid an undesirable correspondentattribution, participants were moresensitive to information on situa-tional constraints. These results arediscussed in terms of motivatedreasoning processes and the moti-vation to derogate the outgroup.

* Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel.E-mail: gauntr@mail.biu.ac.il This research was supported by Grant ARC 96/01.198 of the Communauté Française deBelgique. We thank Olivier Corneille for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of thisarticle.**Department of Psychology, Catholic University of Louvain at Louvain-la-Neuve.

RIPS / IRSP, 17 (1), 5-20 © 2004, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble

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People’s preference of ingroups over outgroups seems to be auniversal characteristic of human social life (Brewer & Brown,

1998). The motivation to view the ingroup in a more favorableway than the outgroup was found to influence various cognitiveprocesses such as memory (e.g., Howard & Rothbart, 1980), sta-tistical inference (e.g., Schaller, 1992), causal attribution (e.g.,Hewstone, 1990; Pettigrew, 1979), and language use (e.g., Maass,Salvi, Arcuri, & Semin, 1989). The present study examines howthe motivation to perceive the ingroup as more human than theoutgroup affects the use of situational information to discountattribution of emotions. In order to clarify its reasoning and pre-dictions, we first briefly introduce three separate lines of researchin social psychology, all of which have important implications forthe attribution of emotions to ingroup and outgroup members:(a) motivated reasoning, (b) dispositional attribution, and (c)attribution of humanity to social groups.

Motivated Reasoning

Theories on the influence of motivation on social inferenceprocesses suggest that motivation to arrive at a particular conclu-sion may determine the hypotheses people focus on or the man-ner in which they go about testing their hypotheses (Kruglanski,1989; Kunda, 1990; Pyszczynski & Greenberg, 1987). In particular,Kunda’s (1990) model of motivated reasoning suggests that bias-ing motivation affects people’s reasoning by influencing thechoice of beliefs and strategies applied to a given problem. Amajor assumption in this model is that when motivated to arriveat a particular conclusion, people attempt to be rational and todraw the desired conclusion on the basis of appropriate evi-dence. Thus, they search their memory for those beliefs and rulesthat could support their desired conclusion. Indeed, there isample evidence indicating that motives may bias the selectionand construction of beliefs about the self, other people, andevents (Kunda, 1990). For example, participants who were led toview introversion as more desirable than extraversion generatedmore introverted autobiographical memories than did partici-pants who were led to view extraversion as more desirable(Sanitioso, Kunda, & Fong, 1990). There is also some evidenceshowing that motives may bias the use of inferential rules. For

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example, in Ginossar and Trope’s study (1987, Exp. 4), while con-trol participants tended to ignore the base rate information, moti-vated participants used base rate information in order to arrive attheir desired inference. These and other findings (e.g., Sanitioso& Kunda, 1991; Schaller, 1992) suggest that motivated peopleconduct a biased search for an inferential rule that would yieldtheir desired conclusion (Kunda, 1990).

Dispositional Attribution

Because people cannot directly observe others’ feelings and traits,they need to infer them from observable behaviors. This task ofattributing behaviors to inner dispositions is a complex inferentialproblem that demands the integration of various pieces of infor-mation, such as the actor’s previous behaviors, his or her other dis-positions, and the situational inducements that could haveinfluenced the behavior. According to Kelley’s normative “dis-counting principle” (Kelley, 1972), attribution of behavior to anygiven cause should be attenuated in the presence of other poten-tial causes for behavior. Thus, attribution of behavior to personaldisposition should be attenuated in the presence of situationalinducements to perform the behavior. However, numerous studieshave found that people tend to underutilize situational informa-tion and to attribute behavior to a correspondent disposition evenin the presence of strong situational inducements (see e.g. Jones,1979; Jones & Harris, 1967; Jones & Nisbett, 1972; Leyens, Yzerbyt,& Corneille, 1996; Trope & Gaunt, 2000; for a review, see Gilbert &Malone, 1995). Apparently, taking the situational inducements intoaccount in the inference is an effortful mental process. Indeed,research suggests that people are particularly likely to ignore situ-ational information when their cognitive resources are impaired(e.g., Gilbert & Osborne, 1989; Gilbert, Pelham, & Krull, 1988;Trope & Alfieri, 1997) or when they are not particularly motivatedto invest effort in the inferential task (e.g, Corneille, Leyens,Yzerbyt, & Walther, 1999; Tetlock, 1985, 1992). It is therefore plau-sible that increased motivation to reach a particular dispositionalinference may lead people to use the situational information whenit is likely to yield their desired inference. Motivated to avoid anundesirable dispositional inference, people may be especially likelyto use situational information to discount their inference.

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Attribution of Humanity to Groups

The motivation to discriminate between the ingroup and out-groups is one of the most fundamental and well-documentedphenomena in intergroup relations. Intergroup bias was demon-strated in many studies that used various contexts and measures(for a review see Brewer & Brown, 1998). Studies even showedthat the mere perception of belonging to different groups trig-gers ingroup favoritism and relative outgroup discrimination(e.g., Billig & Tajfel, 1973; Gaertner & Insko, 2000; Turner,Sachdev, & Hogg, 1983). Intergroup bias sometimes stems fromingroup favoritism and the absence of equivalent favoritismtoward outgroups (Brewer, 1999). Very often, however, it isdirectly linked to outgroup hate and hostility.

A unique form of intergroup bias was recently documented byLeyens and his colleagues (2000, 2001) who suggested that peo-ple derogate the outgroup by attributing it a lesser degree ofhumanity than the ingroup (see also Bar-Tal, 1989; Struch &Schwartz, 1989). Their research focused on the attribution ofhuman emotions, that is, emotions that are perceived as uniqueto human beings. An initial study (Demoulin et al., in press)established the lay distinction between uniquely human emo-tions (e.g., admiration, hope, regret) and more simple emotionsthat may also be experienced by animals (e.g., fear, surprise,anger). The complex human emotions are called secondary emo-tions, and the simple animal-like emotions are called primaryemotions.

A series of studies (Gaunt, Leyens, & Demoulin, 2002; Leyens etal., 2000, 2001) then showed that people tend to attribute moresecondary emotions to the ingroup than to an outgroup, whileno difference occurs in the attribution of primary emotions. Intwo of these studies (Leyens et al., 2001), people selected morecomplex secondary emotions to characterize the ingroup thanthe outgroup, while there was no difference for the more simpleprimary emotions. Other experiments demonstrated people’sreluctance to attribute secondary emotions to outgroup mem-bers. For example, in one experiment (Leyens et al., 2001, Study3), people estimated particularly low levels of secondary emo-tions for the outgroup compared with secondary emotions forthe ingroup and with primary emotions for both groups. Similar

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findings were obtained with implicit memory measures (Gaunt,Leyens, & Demoulin, 2002). Findings showed that people betterremembered associations between the outgroup and secondaryemotions than the ingroup and secondary emotions, presumablybecause the former were inconsistent with their view of the out-group as less human. Taken together, these findings indicate thatpeople are motivated to deny secondary emotions to outgroupmembers.

The Present Study

Putting together the implications derived from the above threelines of research, we reasoned that when motivated to avoidattributing an emotion to a target person, people would be moresensitive to situational information that implies a discounting ofsuch emotion attribution. In particular, we hypothesized thatwhen observing an outgroup member expressing a secondaryemotion, people’s motivation to view the outgroup as lesshuman than the ingroup would yield a reluctance to make a cor-respondent emotion attribution. This in turn would motivatethem to look for information on situational constraints that couldhave forced the target person to express the emotion. Such infor-mation would imply that the target did not experience the corre-spondent emotion, and would enable perceivers to avoid theundesirable correspondent attribution. For example, whenencountering a member of a disliked outgroup expressing sec-ondary emotions such as sympathy or shame, people may bemotivated to look for situational incentives for such behaviorsand to conclude that the person did not actually experience theseemotions.However, when facing an outgroup member expressing primaryemotions such as fear or surprise, or an ingroup memberexpressing primary or secondary emotions, people would lackthe motivation to avoid a correspondent inference. Under thesecircumstances, they are likely to exhibit the usual insensitivity tosituational constraints and infer a correspondent emotion even inthe presence of situational inducements to express the emotion. The current experiment thus examines how the target’s groupmembership and the type of expressed emotion affect the use ofsituational information in drawing emotion inferences from

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behavior. The target’s group membership was thus manipulated,as well as the type of emotion he expressed and the situationaldemands.

METHOD

Overview

Participants read an essay describing the writer’s tendency to expe-rience a particular emotion. The writer was identified as either aningroup member or an outgroup member and the topic of theessay was either the experience of a secondary emotion or a pri-mary emotion. The instructions indicated whether or not thewriter was free to express his true tendencies. The design was thusgroup membership (ingroup vs. outgroup) x type of emotion (sec-ondary vs. primary) x situational demands (choice vs. no-choice)between participants factorial design. All participants were toldthat their task was to diagnose the writer’s true tendency to expe-rience the emotion.

Participants

Participants were 54 female students and 52 male students at theUniversity of Louvain-la-Neuve who volunteered to participate inthe experiment. They were randomly assigned to the eight con-ditions comprising the experimental design.

Procedure

The experiment was conducted in individual sessions. The instruc-tions were presented in a booklet and repeated by the experi-menter. Participants were told that the experiment investigates theprocess of forming impressions of other people. They were furthertold that they would receive a photocopied questionnaire ostensi-bly filled in by another student who participated in an experimentabout the role of emotions in social relationships. Participants weretold that the student had to write a short essay on his tendency toexperience a particular emotion, and that their task would be toread the essay and assess the student’s true tendency to experi-ence this emotion.Participants in the secondary emotion condition were theninformed that the topic of the essay was the experience of tender-

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ness, while in the primary emotion condition participants weretold that the topic was the experience of pleasure. These emotionswere chosen for use in the experiment on the basis of an earlierstudy (Demoulin et al., in press), in which people rated tendernessas being experienced only by human beings, whereas pleasure wasrated as a more animal-like emotion.

Participants then received information regarding situationaldemands. In the no-choice condition, participants were informedthat the student was instructed to assert that he has a strong ten-dency to experience the emotion frequently and with high inten-sity. In the unconstrained condition participants were told thatthe student was free to write that he has a strong or a weak ten-dency to experience this emotion.

After reading the instructions, participants were provided withthe photocopied questionnaire allegedly filled in by the student.Its first part included a few background questions, with theanswers written in handwriting. From the background informa-tion participants learned that the student was a 20-year-old maleof Belgian (ingroup) or Turkish (outgroup) nationality, depend-ing on the group condition.

The second part of the photocopied questionnaire consisted ofthe handwritten essay, which unambiguously stated that thewriter has a strong tendency to experience the emotion in ques-tion and provided examples for circumstances in which he tendsto experience it intensely.

After reading the essay, participants rated the extent to which thewriter tends to experience the emotion on a 13-point scale rang-ing from 1 (not at all) to 13 (very much). This question served asa measure of attribution of emotion. Participants then rated onsimilar scales (a) the extent to which the writer was free toexpress any tendency and (b) the tendency that the writerexpressed in the essay. These two questions served as measuresof participants’ identification of situational demands and theactor’s behavior, respectively. Finally, participants rated on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much) the degreeto which (c) the content of the essay was positive, (d) the essay

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was nicely written, and (e) they believed that the essay wasindeed written by another participant. These three questionsserved as control measures for the perceived valence and authen-ticity of the essay in the different conditions. Participants werethen probed for suspicion, debriefed, and dismissed.

Results

Perceived Characteristics of the Essay

The ratings of the essay’s valence, niceness, and authenticitywere subjected to Situational Demands (choice vs. no-choice) �

Emotion (primary vs. secondary) � Group (ingroup vs. out-group) analyses of variance (ANOVAs). Results showed no signif-icant effect of the experimental variables. The essay was alwaysperceived as positive (M = 5.16) and as moderately nicely written(M=3.35) regardless of the experimental condition. In addition,while reading the essay participants tended to believe that it wasindeed written by another participant (M = 4.88). Thus, asintended, the situational information, the use of primary or sec-ondary emotion as the essay’s topic, and the target’s group mem-bership did not affect the essay’s authenticity and perceivedcharacteristics.

Situation and Behavior Identification

The situation and behavior identification measures were similarlysubjected to Situational Demands�Emotion�Group analyses ofvariance (ANOVAs). As expected, there was a strong main effectof situational demands on situation identification, F (1, 98) =81.29, p < .001. Participants reported that the writer couldexpress himself freely more in the choice condition (M = 5.05)than in the no-choice condition (M = 2.42). No other effect wassignificant in this analysis. In addition, there were no significanteffects of the experimental variables on behavior identification.The essay was always perceived as expressing a strong tendencyto experience the emotion (M = 10.07). As intended, then, thesituational information and the content of the essay were unam-biguous so that their interpretations were not affected by thetype of emotion or the writer’s group membership.

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Emotion Attribution

Participants’ ratings of the writer’s true tendency to experience theemotion are presented in Table 1. These ratings were analyzed in aSituational Demands � Emotion � Group analysis of variance(ANOVA). This analysis yielded a significant main effect of situa-tional demands on the attribution of emotion, F (1, 98) = 4.72,

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TABLE 1CorrespondentAttributions of Emotion

Secondary emotion Primary emotion

Ingroup Outgroup Ingroup Outgroup

No-choice 10.08 7.75 8.62 9.46

Choice 10.13 10.14 9.14 9.46

Note. Higher values indicate higher emotion attributions

p < .05. Participants in the free choice condition attributed to thewriter a correspondent emotion (M = 9.73) more than participantsin the no-choice condition (M = 8.98). In addition, there was a sig-nificant interaction between emotion and group, F(1, 98) = 6.10, p < .05. This interaction indicates that participants attributed morecorrespondent secondary emotion to the ingroup than to the out-group target, F (1, 98) = 6.61, p < .05, while no difference in attri-butions occurred for primary emotion, F (1, 98) = 1.16, n.s.This interaction was qualified, however, by the SituationalDemands �Emotion�Group interaction. As can be seen inTable1, participants used the situational information to discountthe emotion attribution only for the experience of secondaryemotions by an outgroup target. In this outgroup/secondaryemotion condition, while participants in the free choice condi-tion made highly correspondent attributions (M = 10.14), partic-ipants in the no-choice condition made a strong discounting oftheir attributions (M = 7.75), F (1, 98) = 3.26, p < .01. However,in the three other group-emotion conditions, where an ingroupmember expressed a strong tendency to experience secondaryemotions, or where an ingroup or an outgroup memberexpressed a strong tendency to experience primary emotions,participants ignored the situational information and did not dis-count their attributions accordingly (all three Fs < 1).

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Discussion

The current results showed that participants used the situationalinformation to discount the attribution of emotions only in a con-dition where an outgroup member expressed a strong tendencyto experience secondary emotions. When an ingroup memberexpressed such a tendency, or when both groups’ membersexpressed a tendency to experience primary emotions, partici-pants did not take the information on situational constraints intoaccount and drew correspondent emotion attributions.These findings are consistent with our hypothesis that whenmotivated to avoid an undesirable correspondent attribution,people would be more sensitive to information about situationalconstraints on the target’s behavior. In particular, the currentfindings suggest that when people encounter an outgroup mem-ber expressing secondary emotions, their motivation to view theoutgroup as less human than the ingroup prevents them frommaking a correspondent attribution. However, because peopleattempt to be rational and to reach their conclusion on the basisof relevant evidence (Kunda, 1990), they search for informationthat would imply that the target did not truly experience the cor-respondent emotion. In these circumstances, information on sit-uational constraints that could have forced the target person toexpress the emotions becomes particularly useful. Such informa-tion enables motivated people to avoid the undesirable attribu-tion of secondary emotions to an outgroup member.The current findings are in line with existing literature on moti-vated reasoning. Consistent with Kunda’s (1990) model, peoplein our study did not simply draw their desired conclusion. Underthe free choice condition, when there was no information sug-gesting that the writer was forced to express strong emotionaltendency, people made a correspondent emotion attributioneven when this attribution was undesirable for them. Only undera no-choice condition, where the writer’s behavior was con-strained, did people use the situational constraints as evidencesupporting their desired conclusion.The increased sensitivity to information exhibited by motivatedpeople in our study is similar to previous findings from Schaller’s(1992) and Ginossar and Trope’s (1987) studies. In Schaller’s(1992) study, people engaged in more complex data integration

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strategies only when these enabled them to avoid an undesirableconclusion about their ingroup. Similarly, in Ginossar and Trope’sstudy (1987), people took into account base rate informationonly when they were motivated to reach a specific conclusionthat was supported by this information. In the same manner, inthe current experiment people took into account situationalinformation only when they were motivated to avoid an undesir-able attribution that could be discounted on the basis of thisinformation.

The findings are also consistent with previous findings reportedin the dispositional attribution literature (e.g., Jones, 1979; Jones& Harris, 1967; Leyens, Yzerbyt, & Corneille, 1996; Miller, Jones,& Hinkle, 1981). People in our study were usually insensitive tosituational information and showed the well-documented corre-spondence bias (for a review, see Gilbert & Malone, 1995). Thatis, under control conditions they tended to attribute the writer atendency to experience the expressed emotions even in the pres-ence of strong situational inducements.

Motivation to avoid correspondent attribution was manipulatedin our study through the use of primary or secondary emotionsas the topic of the essay in combination with the writer’s groupmembership. This manipulation is based on previous studieswhich showed that people are reluctant to attribute secondaryemotions to outgroup members (Leyens et al., 2000, 2001).However, as people’s motivation to derogate the outgroup wasnot directly manipulated, we cannot completely rule out an alter-native interpretation of our findings in cognitive terms. It couldwell be the case that cognitive factors such as people’s mentalmodels of the groups contributed to the strong discounting ofsecondary emotion attribution to an outgroup member. Such aninterpretation, however, would still necessitate further specula-tions on why people came to hold different beliefs concerningthe ingroup and outgoup members’ emotional tendencies in thefirst place (Schaller, 1992). An exclusively cognitive account of thedifferential attributions of emotions to groups would thus seemincomplete.

An interesting question derived from the above is whether theuse of situational information in the attribution process would besimilarly affected by other determinants of people’s motivation

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for outgroup derogation. For example, Fein and Spencer (1997)showed that people are more likely to derogate an outgroupmember following a threat on their self-esteem. Therefore, itcould be interesting to explore whether threat to people’s self-esteem would lead them to use situational information more todiscount undesirable attributions to ingroup and outgroup mem-bers.Finally, the motivated attribution process demonstrated in thecurrent study has important implications for the attribution ofhuman emotions to groups. Motivationally driven reasoning mayserve to maintain existing impressions of groups and may preventthe revision of such impressions following disconfirming evi-dence (e.g., Kunda & Oleson, 1995; Johnston & Hewstone, 1992;Johnston & Macrae, 1994). More specifically, the current findingsimply that not only are outgroup members spontaneously attrib-uted less secondary emotions than ingroup members (Leyens etal., 2000), but even when they are unambiguously expressing sec-ondary emotions chances are that people would find reasons tobelieve that they are not actually experiencing such emotions.

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