‘Implicit justifications’ and self-serving group allocations

✍ Scribed by KRISTINA A. DIEKMANN

• Book ID: 101288070
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 184 KB
• Volume: 18
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0894-3796
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1379(199701)18:1<3::aid-job793>3.0.co;2-d

✦ Synopsis

In comparison to allocating resources to oneself, when allocating resources to one's group, people are able to `get away with' taking more than a fair and equal share because there exists an implicit justi®cation that fellow group members will bene®t. Such an implicit justi®cation enables people to hide their self-serving motivation. Results reveal that subjects allocating a sum of money between their group and a competing group took a signi®cantly greater share of the resource than subjects allocating between themselves and a competing individual. Whether the allocation was made public or kept private had a signi®cant impact on this relationship: the dierence between group and self allocations was signi®cantly greater when the allocation was made public than when kept private. However, subjects allocating only to themselves and in private were almost as self-serving as subjects allocating to their group (both in private and in public). The only case where subjects were overly constrained by equality was when they were allocating to only themselves and the allocation was made public. *