Influence of Factors Availability and Positivity of Social Category on Intergroup Perception

This article is devoted to studying influence of factors of availability and positive emotional coloring on an ethnic categorization. In article opportunity by means of the stimulating material to increase probability for activation of an ethnic categorization at the Moscow school students is studied. Article is the cornerstone on the theory of social identity of Tejfel and Turner and the factors making social identity, described in works O. A. Gulevich. Research studied in which opportunity to affect a social categorization of school students by means of granting to it the printing material containing the available emotional coloring promoting a choice of ethnic category as the main in a technique "the 4th superfluous" was conducted. Research consisted of two stages: in the first case we checked a hypothesis for importance of a factor of availability of ethnic category, showing trained article about the ethnic migrants with neutral coloring. At the second investigation phase we added the material describing a negative image of the migrant, thus, respondents had opportunity for receiving a positive assessment of own ethnic group at the expense of the shown negative image of other ethnic group. 63 pupils of Moscow schools at the age of 12-15 years, 27 males and 36 female took part in research. These researches show that it isn't enough only one factor of availability to activation of an ethnic categorization, but in the presence of a factor of positivity of own in-group in comparison with out-group, the frequency of activation of ethnic category becomes higher. Thus, research showed that existence of a factor of positivity of an ingroup, in comparison with out-group, in a bigger measure promotes activation of ethnic category in a situation of intergroup interaction at the level of the statistical importance.

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