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

The present study investigated hypotheses concerning the relationship between strength of social identification and intergroup differentiation and between personal self-esteem and self-serving bias for groups in the relational quadrants of Hinkle & Brown's taxonomy. Thirty groups each of individualists and collectivists were randomly assigned to either a compatible or an incompatible goal condition. During 10, 20-second trials, subjects worked on the Tarkus Block task in which they built their own tower and a group tower as high as possible. Afterwards, they evaluated their own group, the outgroup, themselves, and another member of the ingroup on attitude and task performance scales. Then they completed a group identification scale and a state self-esteem scale. For collectivists, a significant relationship was found 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 collectivists, although only one of the correlations was significant. These unexpected and interesting results qualify and add to the findings from other research which show that the identity-differentiation relationship is usually the strongest for collectivists in a relational intergroup context.