Us and them: Mood effects on ingroup projection

摘要

Mood states affect judgments in general and intergroup judgments in particular. The aim of the present research was to show that ingroup projection is influenced by affective states in a similar way as ingroup bias. Varying mood states and relevance of the intergroup situation orthogonally, the results supported the hypotheses that positive mood in conjunction with low relevance and negative mood in conjunction with high relevance elicit higher levels of biased prototypicality perceptions compared to the other conditions of the design. Given substantial evidence from previous research that mood in conjunction with perceived relevance moderates motivated versus heuristic processing, we propose that the present results correspond with motivation- versus cognition-based ingroup projection and suggest different processes underlying the phenomenon of relative ingroup prototypicality.