IMPLICIT AND CATEGORY-BASED ALLOCATIONS OF DECISION-MAKING POWER IN MAJORITY MINORITY RELATIONS

Using a social categorization paradigm, the present study explores the minimal conditions which elicit group-level justice concerns with regard to the allocation of decision-making power between a majority and a minority. Results show that, given the opportunity to choose an implicit category-blind decision rule to be implemented in a group decision-making task (the decision being about the allocation of a scarce resource between the groups), minority subjects requested larger majorities for the decision than did majority and control subjects but only after the potential for intergroup divergence and intragroup homogeneity in decision preferences was made salient. When they were asked to choose a category-based decision rule, the majority of subjects requested a majority vote from each of the groups, and no subject deprived the minority of the power of veto. In their vote for the distribution of a scarce resource, minority and control subjects followed a minority-favoring principle whereas majority subjects were split between equal and minority-favoring allocations. © 1993 Academic Press.