The Politics of Affirmation Theory: When Group-Affirmation Leads to Greater Ingroup Bias

It has been well established in the literature that affirming the individual self reduces the tendency to exhibit group-favoring biases. the limited research examining group-affirmation and bias,however,is inconclusive. we argue that group-affirmation can exacerbate group-serving biases in certain contexts,and in the current set of studies,we document this phenomenon directly. unlike self-affirmation,group-affirmation led to greater ingroup-favoring evaluative judgments among political partisans (experiment 1). this increase in evaluative bias following group-affirmation was moderated by political party identification and was not found among those who affirmed a non-political ingroup (experiment 2). in addition,the mechanism underlying these findings is explored and interpreted within the theoretical frameworks of self-categorization theory and the multiple self-aspects model (experiments 2 and 3). the broader implications of our findings for the understanding of social identity and affirmation theory are discussed. © 2015,© 2015 by the society for personality and social psychology,inc.