Overlapping mental representations of self, ingroup, and outgroup: Unraveling self-stereotyping and self-anchoring

Smith and collaborators presented strong response time evidence for overlapping mental representations of the self and relevant ingroups, and they interpreted their findings as reflecting that people define themselves in terms of their ingroups. Besides on inferences from ingroup to self (self-stereotyping) however, self-ingroup overlap could also be based on inferences from the self to the ingroup (self-anchoring). The present research tackled this interpretational ambiguity and empirically distinguished self-anchoring versus self-stereotyping as processes possibly underlying se flingroup overlap. Results from three studies revealed stronger evidence for inferences from self to ingroup (self-anchoring) than the other way round (self-stereotyping).