INTERGROUP ATTRIBUTIONS IN MINIMAL GROUPS

Two minimal group experiments examined whether categorization into in-roup and out-group leads to bias in attributions for success and failure. Adolescents from two Oxford schools were led to believe that they belonged to one of two groups. The students were then asked to evaluate th performance of anonymous members of the in-group and the out-group on a cognitive task and to make attributions for the success or the failure of this performance. Strong intergroup discrimination in point allocation was not evident in either experiment, but a relationship between bias in allocation of points and bias in attributions was evident in both experiments.