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 less apt to exhibit ingroup favoritism when they perform well individually while their in-group performs poorly. The authors evaluated whether this finding 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 between the two. The authors hypothesized that relative to their counterparts from the United States, participants from the People's Republic of China would have more of a collective-primacy orientation and therefore would exhibit more ingroup favoritism when they performed well individually while their in-group performed poorly The results supported the hypothesis. Implications for the literatures on in-group favoritism and crosscultural differences are discussed.