The Moderation Effect of Self-Enhancement on the Group-Reference Effect

Previous studies have documented that people tend to respond faster and memorize better to the in-group traits. It may be particularly manifest for ethnic minorities, due to their salient ethnic identity. However, few studies have explored how the valence of traits modulates the in-group preference effect. The present study examined the impacts of ethnic identity salience and the valence of traits on the group-preference effect among 33 Han Chinese in a Tibetan-dominant area and 32 Tibetan participants in a Han-dominant area. Two weeks before the experiment, we measured the ethnic identity salience of participants in both groups. In the formal experiment, we used the group-reference effect (GRE) paradigm with three encoding tasks. The results showed that, regardless of whether ethnic identity was salient, both groups responded faster to positive traits than to negative traits when evaluating their own group, whereas there were no significant difference between the processing of positive traits and negative traits in the out-group evaluation and font judgment tasks. This suggested a pervasive processing advantage of the in-group positive characteristics. The results imply that self-enhancement motivation had a moderation effect on the GRE, as well as the ethnic identity salience may not be necessary for a GRE.