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Defensive helping: threat to group identity, ingroup identification, status stability, and common group identity as

Arie Nadler1, Gal Harpaz-Gorodeisky, Yael Ben-David

  • 1Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. arie@freud.tau.ac.il

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
|October 28, 2009
PubMed

On the basis of development of the concept of "defensive helping," the authors demonstrated that high ingroup identifiers thwart a threat to group identity through defensive help-giving (i.e., by extending help to an outgroup member whose achievements jeopardize their status). Participants were 255 Israeli high school students (130 boys and 125 girls) ages 16-18. The phenomenon of defensive helping was demonstrated in a minimal group (Study 1) and real-group (Study 2) experiment. Study 3, which examined real groups, supported the extension of the phenomenon of defensive helping to relations between high- and low-status groups, showing that members of a high-status group who perceive status relations with the low-status outgroup as unstable will protect the ingroup's identity by providing dependency-oriented help to the low-status outgroup. Priming for common ingroup identity reversed this pattern, with participants electing to offer autonomy-oriented rather than defensive help. Theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed with respect to social change, paternalism, and helping between nations.

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