The role of the group type and the characteristics of self-attitude in students’ social perception

The article deals with the problem of disparate studies in social perceptions of different types of groups, which impede the understanding of its fundamental mechanisms. Different types of social groups appear in the research as stimulus descriptions of their artificial analogues, singled out according to ethnic, ideological and stratification criteria. As a mediating factor of social perception, the features of subject’s self-attitude (self-acceptance and self-rejection) are considered. The study involved 307 females and 109 males from 17 to 22 years old (M = 18.92, SD = 0.93). It was found that perceiving of different types of social groups determines the varying degrees of stereotyping and bias intensity. Both of these phenomena are most observable for the groups identified by stratification criterion. Ingroup favoritism is also more conspicuous for the subject’s “ideological” ingroup in comparison with the groups of different types. It was also shown that self-attitude plays a facilitating role in the manifestations of ingroup favoritism: both self-acceptance and self-rejection contribute to the growth of perceptional bias, but do not “participate” in outgroup stereotyping.

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