关键词: 群体参照效应, 社会身份, 社会认同, 自我

Abstract: A substantial body of research on the group-reference effect (GRE) has shown that the reliable memory advantage for information encoded about one’s own group over material encoded about other groups. Although the group-reference effect has been confirmed in numerous studies, many issues still remain to be resolved. Among these issues, the most apparent one is what factors may affect the strength of the group-reference effect. Although some external factors affect GRE have been discussed in the previous studies, however, some other factors especially individual factors still need to be further explored. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to examine the importance of the intra-individual social identities, as well as the social identification of different social identities which effect on GRE. To explore whether these factors affect individual self-memory advantage or not, in the present study, we employ adjectives as materials in the GRE paradigm, there are four group reference conditions (national, ethnic, gender, occupation). 25 healthy students participated in this experiment (15 females and 10 males, with a mean age of 23.7 years). This experiment consists of three parts: the encoding phase, distraction phase, recognition phase. During the encoding phase, participants were given a list of personality traits. From that list, asked them to decide whether a given word described themselves. Under the ingroup-reference condition ‘Does this word generally describe Chinese?’ or ‘Does this word generally describe boy/girl?’ and so on. The questions for the outgroup-reference condition are ‘Does this word generally describe American?’ or ‘Does this word generally describe middle school students?’ and so on. The lists of words had been matched for valence, word frequency and length. There were 5 blocks, the first block were exercise, the other four blocks contained 30 trials for each reference condition, so there were 120 trials in total. Following the encoding task, participants completed a 5-min distraction task and then moved on to the recognition task. The participant’s task was to judge whether each word had been presented in the encoding phase. The recognition rates data were submitted to a one-way repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) respectively for the importance and social identification of social identities. There were significant main effect of the importance, F (3, 24) = 3.852, p = .017, η2 = .14, the pairwise comparisons showed that recognition rates of adjectives considered for the high important social identity were remembered significantly better than the moderate and low important social identities (ps < .05). There were no significant main effects of the identification, F (3, 24) = 2.647, p = .064, η2 = .10. The results showed that the more important social identity, the larger the corresponding group reference effect, while the level of social identification had no significant effect on the group reference effect. Our findings suggested that in the individual's self, the different social identities that are arranged in order of importance, the more important the closer the core of self - concept, and the importance also affects cognitive processing of collective self - related information.

Key words: group reference effect, Social identity, Social identification, Self