Overlapping mental representations of self and in-group: Reaction time evidence and its relationship with explicit measures of group identification

People's reports on their own traits are facilitated by matches with their in-group's perceived traits and inhibited by mismatches (Smith & Henry, 1996). This suggests that the cognitive representations of the self and in-group overlap. The current study extends this finding in two ways. First, the match/mismatch reaction time effect is found to extend to attitudes as well as to traits. Second, the size of the match/mismatch effect correlates positively with several explicit measures of group identification. The relationship between explicit and implicit measures of group identification, and the relevance of these findings for theories of group identification, are discussed, (C) 2000 Academic Press.